The statistical hypothesis in the OP seems sound...for those of you who&#x27;ve had to pitch studies like these and apply for funding (on any topic)...does the institutional reluctance to fund these studies scale disproportionately to the proposed cost per participant and total possible participants?<p>i.e. is it easier to convince the university&#x2F;funder to do a study that could potentially connect with 6,000 students at just $5 a piece, versus a study that, at most, could reach 600 students at $50 a piece?<p>edit: My guess is -- yes, that it is easier to convince people, even at the university level, with nicer sounding numbers even if competing proposals add up to the same cost, even if the cheaper&#x2F;broader-sounding proposal is scientifically less valid, because in general, people have difficulty with numerical reasoning. I mean, the OP felt the need (and may have been asked to by the WaPo editor) to describe cross-multiplication, something we all were supposed to have learned in elementary school:<p>&gt; <i>But even if the response rate is not 100 percent, it allows us to place a lower bound on how many students have been assaulted. For example, if 90 percent of students respond to the survey, and 20 percent of them say they have been assaulted, we can infer that at least 90 percent x 20 percent = 18 percent of students have been assaulted, even if none of the students who failed to respond were.</i>