American Terrorism and Extremist Crime Data Sources and Selectivity Bias: An Investigation Focusing on Homicide Events Committed by Far-Right Extremists |
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Authors: | Steven M Chermak Joshua D Freilich William S Parkin James P Lynch |
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Institution: | (1) School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, 512 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA;(2) John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA;(3) Bureau of Justice Statistics, Washington, DC, USA |
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Abstract: | This paper examines the reliability of the methods used to capture homicide events committed by far-right extremists in a
number of open source terrorism data sources. Although the number of research studies that use open source data to examine
terrorism has grown dramatically in the last 10 years, there has yet to be a study that examines issues related to selectivity
bias. After reviewing limitations of existing terrorism studies and the major sources of data on terrorism and violent extremist
criminal activity, we compare the estimates of these homicide events from 10 sources used to create the United States Extremist
Crime Database (ECDB). We document incidents that sources either incorrectly exclude or include based upon their inclusion
criteria. We use a “catchment-re-catchment” analysis and find that the inclusion of additional sources result in decreasing
numbers of target events not identified in previous sources and a steadily increasing number of events that were identified
in any of the previous data sources. This finding indicates that collectively the sources are approaching capturing the universe
of eligible events. Next, we assess the effects of procedural differences on these estimates. We find considerable variation
in the number of events captured by sources. Sources include some events that are contrary to their inclusion criteria and
exclude others that meet their criteria. Importantly, though, the attributes of victim, suspect, and incident characteristics
are generally similar across data source. This finding supports the notion that scholars using open-source data are using
data that is representative of the larger universe they are interested in. The implications for terrorism and open source
research are discussed. |
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