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Convenience Samples: What they are, and what they should (and should not) be used for
As noted on our Core Concepts page, we spend a lot of time worrying about the ways data are used to make claims about human rights violations. This is because inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims. Analyses of records of human rights violations are used to guide policy decisions, determine resource allocation for interventions, and inform transitional justice mechanisms. It is vital that such analyses are accurate.
Unfortunately, all too often these decisions are based, inappropriately, on analyses of a single convenience sample. (more…)
Datasets available for research
Over the last few years, we've tried to make the data organized in our projects publicly accessible. We have encouraged our partners to publish the data at the completion of the project. We continue to believe it is important to offer access to the data used in our projects for the sake of transparency as well as to encourage further research and analysis. However, we are increasingly concerned about how raw data are used. Data collected by what we can observe is what statisticians call a convenience sample, which is subject to selection bias.
We're keeping these datasets available for researchers who want to use them for simulation or estimation ...
Welcome!
As of today, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is an independent* non-profit! It's been a long time coming, and we're delighted to have gotten to this point. HRDAG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world; for more information, see our About Us page.
Benetech has spun out the scientific and statistical part of the Human Rights Program to HRDAG. The spinout includes (as staff) me -- Patrick Ball -- and Dr Megan Price, as well as our many part-time scientific and field consultants (a list is here). The software and technology component of our work -- ...
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answer important questions about human rights and patterns of mass violence.
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South Africa
Under apartheid, South Africans from all sides suffered violence and human rights abuses. One of the mandates of the the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to report truth by reporting on violations and victims.
Dr. Patrick Ball, as Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), used the who-did-what-to-whom data model to provide statistical analysis of the violations reported to the Commission, for use in the final report of the TRC.
Links:
http://shr.aaas.org/southafrica/trcsa/
http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index....
Why Collecting Data In Conflict Zones Is Invaluable—And Nearly Impossible
HRDAG's work in Kosovo and in the Guatemalan trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt is discussed in this article. Megan Price, HRDAG's director of research, is quoted. “There is a wide variety of things that could be considered data,” she says.
From the story:
Price’s main data analysis tool requires fitting a model to the data that ends up in her lap. That way, she can see whether there are gaps in the data and what more needs to be included. The method, called multiple systems estimation analysis, lets Price look at patterns across lists of data, for example, lists of victims. The resulting model reveals how much data is missing, to a ...
Data on Kosovo – Other
The other data is in three files. All of the files are comma-delimited UTF-8 (like ASCII but including the characters to render Serbian names). The fields in each file are described below.
If you use these data, please cite them with the following citation, as well as this note:
“These are convenience sample data, and as such they are not a statistically representative sample of events in this conflict. These data do not support conclusions about patterns, trends, or other substantive comparisons (such as over time, space, ethnicity, age, etc.).”
Human Rights Data Analysis Group. (2002). Database of NATO airstrikes, geographic coding, and KLA ...
Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book
At the end of 2014 we completed the evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book database and are pleased to conclude that the database has succeeded in documenting all or nearly all the human losses during conflicts in Kosovo during the period from 1998 to 2000.
With a motto of "Let people remember people," the goal of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to document all people who were killed or disappeared in connection with the war in Kosovo. The project aimed to document all human losses during armed conflict in the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) between 1998 and 2000.
The KMB database evaluation is the fruition of several years of ...
5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch
Dave Neary described “5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch,” listing HRDAG’s work on police homicides in the U.S. and other human rights abuses in other countries.
New results for the identification of municipalities with clandestine graves in Mexico
The goal of this project is identify Mexican municipalities with a high probability of having clandestine graves. Knowing where to search will help to create better public programs regarding missing persons in Mexico.
Use this form to donate to HRDAG
Your tax deductible gift helps us seek justice for victims of human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable, and strengthen the overall human rights advocacy community.
HRDAG is a project of Community Partners, providing us with administrative infrastructure — so we can focus on our mission and work. We are grateful for your (and their) support.
How We Choose Projects
For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding.
While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...
Reflections: A Meaningful Partnership between HRDAG and Benetech
I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different.
At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...
Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled
In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...
Megan Price Elected Board Member of Tor Project
Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
“Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
Reflections: Pivotal Moments in Freetown
The summer of 2002 in Washington, DC, was steamy and hot, which is how I remember my introduction to HRDAG. I had begun working with them, while they were still at AAAS, in the late spring, learning all about their core concepts: duplicate reporting and MSE, controlled vocabularies, inter-rater reliability, data models and more. The days were long, with a second shift more often than not running late into the evening. In addition to all the learning, I also helped with matching for the Chad project – that is, identifying multiple records of the same violation – back when matching was done by hand. But it was not long after I arrived in Washington ...
El Salvador 1991 – Who Did What To Whom?
Members of the Salvadoran military committed tens of thousands of killings during the country’s civil war which raged from the late 1970’s until 1990. While working for a peace organization in El Salvador in 1991, Patrick Ball was asked by a colleague at a human rights group to help organize a large collection of human rights testimonies. Trained as a social scientist, Ball created the “Who Did What To Whom” (WTWTW) model for examining human rights data. Ball used this system to create a structured, relational database of violations reported in more than 9,000 testimonies to the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission.
To determine who was most ...
Learning the Hard Way at the ICTY: Statistical Evidence of Human Rights Violations in an Adversarial Information Environment.
Amelia Hoover Green. In Collective Violence and International Criminal Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Alette Smeulers, Antwerp, Belgium. © 2010 Intersentia. All rights reserved. [Link coming soon]
Tech Corner
The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. Click the accordion blocks below to reveal each of the Tech Corner entries.
Sifting Massive Datasets with Machine Learning
Principled Data Processing