Event Data
Event data -- nominal or ordinal codes recording the interactions between international actors -- are one of the most common types of information used in quantitative international relations research. The creation of event data is basically a process content analysis and involves three steps:
- A source or sources of news about political interactions is identified.
This could be an internationally-oriented newspaper such as The
New York Times, a set of regional newspapers and newsmagazines,
a news summary such as Facts on File or Deadline Data on
World Affairs, or a newswire service such as Reuters or the Associated
Press.
- A coding system is developed, or a researcher may decide to use
an existing coding system such as the World Events Interaction Survey
(WEIS) or Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) systems. The coding
system specifies what types of political interactions constitute an
"event," identifies the political actors that will be coded
(for example, whether nonstate actors such as international organizations
and guerrilla movements will be included in the data set), specifies
the categories of events and their codes, and specifies any information
to be coded in addition to the basic event. For example, the COPDAB
data set codes a general "issue area"-- whether an action
is primarily military, economic, diplomatic or one of five other types
of relationship. WEIS, in contrast, codes for specific "issue
arenas" such as the Vietnam War, Arab- Israeli conflict, and
SALT negotiations.
- In a machine-coding project, coding rules are implemented in a computer program such as TABARI by using extensive dictionaries which identify actors and events and then associate these with specific codes. These dictionaries are developed by coding a large number of test sentences from the actual data and adding the appropriate vocabulary when the machines makes an error.