There are a number of mechanisms via which ions and electrons interact in a plasma, but by far one of the most important is through dielectronic recombination (DR). This is a resonant process through which an ion can capture a free electron and decrease its charge by one unit. Cross sections or strengths for this process are of vital importance in the modeling of hot plasmas and hence any advance in measurement or calculation procedures for obtaining DR data is of great importance. The work presented here examines the underlying basis of a newly developed method based on leaky mode ion extraction from an electron beam ion trap (EBIT), for relatively quickly obtaining DR strengths. The development attains to use the ratio of the leaked ions in adjacent charge states, i.e., the initial and final charge states of a DR process, to obtain the strengths preassuming that this ratio is the same as that of the ions remaining inside the EBIT trap. This work shows this assumption to be false. Hence DR strengths measured using leaked ions may be subject to error. But this work also reveals that the difference between this ratio and the one for trapped ions is insensitive to most of the experimental conditions, which means reliable DR strengths can still be obtained by leaky mode ion extraction if proper corrections are applied. An example is shown in this paper where after correction of some experimental results for DR strengths, obtained using the leaky mode, excellent agreement with corresponding theoretical calculations is obtained.