IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v52y2015i1p125-128.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Making uncertainty explicit

Author

Listed:
  • Nils B Weidmann

    (Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz)

  • Espen Geelmuyden Rød

    (University of Konstanz & Conditions of Violence and Peace Department, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO))

Abstract

When coding events from media sources – as the majority of data projects do – different reports may oftentimes contain contradictory information. What do coders make of this? It is up to them to aggregate different reports into one coded event, and to supplement missing information based on other sources or their own background information. If not addressed properly, this may lead to a lack of replicability and to low reliability of the final data product. In this short article, we present an approach for separating (i) event reports and the information contained in them, and (ii) events, which are based on aggregate information from the reports and constitute the final data product. Our procedure preserves uncertainty arising from multiple reports and gives the user control over how missing and conflicting information should be dealt with. We illustrate our procedure with data from a current coding project, the Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD).

Suggested Citation

  • Nils B Weidmann & Espen Geelmuyden Rød, 2015. "Making uncertainty explicit," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 52(1), pages 125-128, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:52:y:2015:i:1:p:125-128
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/52/1/125.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    event data; media bias; protest;
    All these keywords.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:52:y:2015:i:1:p:125-128. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.prio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.