Any quantitative conflict researcher has heard of RAND’s Worldwide Terrorism Incident Database (RWTID). RWTID is one of the best sources of data on terrorism, the whole thing was web-accessible and well documented (like a Google for terrorist attacks). So, you can understand my annoyance when RAND took the database offline and now wants to start charging to access:
On March 31, 2008, support for development and dissemination of the Worldwide Terrorism Incident Database lapsed, causing the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism to remove web-based search of that database from its website. Since then, RAND has received many requests for access to the data. RAND is exploring options for making the data available on a subscription basis. If you wish to subscribe to a web-based search engine accessing the database, please contact us. Until RAND concludes this inquiry, we will provide customized search results on a fee-for-service basis. To price such a search, please send us the details of your request, including the types of terrorist events you wish to search for, the countries you are searching, the time period over which the search should be run, and any particular key words (groups, weapons, targets, etc.) you may be searching for.
Sigh.
Infant mortality rates (the number of children younger than one year that die per 1000 live births) are incredibly sensitive to disruptions in society. Even a minor disturbance in a region’s economic, social, and political system can create a parallel, observable effect in infant mortality data. Two political scientists, M. Rodwan Abouharb of Louisiana State University and Anessa L. Kimball of Université Laval, offer one of the most comprehensive datasets on infant mortality rates:
Systematic data on annual infant mortality rates are of use to a variety of social science research programs in demography, economics, sociology, and political science. Infant mortality rates may be used both as a proxy measure for economic development, in lieu of energy consumption or GDP-per-capita measures, and as an indicator of the extent to which governments provide for the economic and social welfare of their citizens. Until recently, data were available for only a limited number of countries based on regional or country-level studies and time periods for years after 1950. Here, the authors introduce a new dataset reporting annual infant mortality rates for all states in the world, based on the Correlates of War state system list, between 1816 and 2002. They discuss past research programs using infant mortality rates in conflict studies and describe the dataset by exploring its geographic and temporal coverage. Next, they explain some of the limitations of the dataset as well as issues associated with the data themselves. Finally, they suggest some research areas that might benefit from the use of this dataset. This new dataset is the most comprehensive source on infant mortality rates currently available to social science researchers.
Download the Codebook
Download the Dataset
The 20/20 Health Systems Project just launched with a new web-accessible database of health systems statistics:
The Health Systems Database draws data from publicly available and internationally comparable databases. Sources are publications from the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). More recent data may be available from other sources including in-country sources. The user contribution section of this tool is designed to capture and share such information.
Hat tip to the Global Health Policy blog.
Full list of variables in the datasets after the break.
Benini, Aldo A, and Lawrence H Moulton. 2004. “Civilian Victims in an Asymmetrical Conflict: Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan.” Journal of Peace Research 41(4):403-422. [Download Data Here]
This dataset on Afghan towns and villages exposed to hostilities after 11 September 2001 is the by-product of a landmine and UXO contamination assessment. The assessment, with a view to creating an inventory of freshly contaminated sites for rapid clearance purposes, was done by the Afghan NGO Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA) with the help of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF), an advocacy and victim assistance organization in humanitarian mine action (Benini & Donahue, 2003).
In spring and early summer 2002, MCPA interviewer teams visited all communities suspected to have been subject to airstrikes or ground operations during Operation Enduring Freedom. These communities - villages or urban neighborhoods - had been nominated by provincial administrations and by neighboring communities; moreover, MCPA had access to coalition airstrike imprints. The teams visited 747 suspect communities, among which exactly 600 were determined to have had at least one airstrike or ground operation. These affected communities were scattered in 102 districts in 25 of the 32 provinces.
In each community confirmed exposed to post-9/11 hostilities, a team would conduct an interview, using a modular questionnaire, with a small group of local key informants. These groups, variable in size and composition, would share information on dates and types of hostilities, prewar and current population, old and new contaminated areas and broad types of munitions, types and numbers of property damaged or destroyed, and finally, victims. Victim numbers were elicited, broken down in several dimensions - by age and sex, cause (direct violence vs. landmine and unexploded ordnance strikes), outcome (deaths and injuries) - as well as two periods of time. Counts were requested of all who had come to harm between 11 September 2001 and the date of survey - a 9-month period on average. Retrospective counts were requested for the period of 12 months prior to 9/11. No attempt was made to attribute the violence that caused these victims to any specific parties to the conflict. Before leaving the community, teams took GPS (Global Positioning System) measurements of the coordinates of a central location such as its mosque.
When I started as a research assistant, my advisor offered three simple pieces of advice: “Get the data, get the data, get the data”. For all the advances in the technique and popularity of quantitative research methods, obtaining the actual data remains haphazard. Some seemingly public data have an almost mythical ability to avoid being accessed. Often the only way to obtain the data used in a published work is to email the author and beg. However, things are looking up, at least at the UN:
The new UN data access system will improve the dissemination of statistics by UNSD to the widest possible audience. An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.
The new site offers a google-ish interface to explore the UN’s vast datasets and will be a welcome tool for quantitative researchers.
Hat Tip: FlowingData