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| Guidelines for Informing Policy via Data CHAPTER 4 - DEVELOPING INDICATORS AND OTHER STATISTICS FROM PRE-EXISTING DATA (page 2)
4.2 EXAMPLES OF PRE-EXISTING DATA
4.2.1 A Trail of Paper
In May 1999, the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was researching events in the former Yugoslavia. The goals of their research questions were to determine how many ethnic Albanians had been and were being forced to leave Kosovo, and who was responsible for their displacement. To begin to seek out data that could answer those questions, AAAS sent Fritz Scheuren and Patrick Ball to study refugees crossing the Albania-Kosovo border.
During that visit, Fritz noticed that the Albanian border guards were recording data about the parties crossing into Albania. Fritz and Patrick soon discovered that the guards were registering every refugee they could in detailed border records. They were successful in doing so except during periods of shooting or shelling on the Kosovo side of the border, when refugees would run through the border as quickly as possible.
Although the AAAS team did not have access to those records immediately, they were able to gain access to them later that year, with permission of the Albanian government. What they found was a large pile of paper (see Figure 4.2.1). Using a scanner at the border, a team captured 690 pages of records. The resulting electronic copies of the pages were of high quality, but several time-periods were missing, including two days in mid-May.
Fortunately, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had conducted an independent count of people on the road passing the border, and had published daily tallies during the conflict. That secondary source of information, combined with the border records, was used to create a single dataset of extraordinarily high quality, containing approximately 404,000 records. From that dataset, a time series of refugee movement could be calculated.
Figure 4.2.1: Records maintained by the Albanian border guards at Morina, March-June 1999. Source: www.amstat.org (accessed March 31 2007 [1])
Using the data they found at the Kosovo-Albanian border, combined with data found in press releases of the United National High Commission for Refugees, Patrick Ball and his team developed indicators of refugee movement. Those indicators were counts of Ethnic Albanians that had left their homes, by two-day periods, between March and May of 1999. The resulting time series is shown in Figure 4.2.2.
Figure 4.2.2: Refugee movement from Kosovo into Albania, March-June 1999. Source: Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo
March - June 1999: A Report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (accessed March 31 2007 [2])
4.2.2 Non-governmental and Intergovernmental Sources of Data
For researchers working in countries where past or current human rights abuses and other governance issues are of concern to policy-makers, non-governmental organisations, academia, governmental bodies, or private firms might have data that the researcher can use. For example, as part the Metagora pilot project in Palestine, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics partnered with local academia and non-govermental organisations to develop a database that included data on the right to education.
Some additional examples of freely accessible non-governmental and government sources of data include:
- Legislation Online provides a database of sample domestic legislation from member countries of the Office for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
- The Electronic Information System for International Law is a database of primary source records related to international law.
- The Trade and Environment Database at American University contains 700 case studies involving globalisation and its impact on the environment, culture, human rights, and labour rights.
- Human Rights Indicators is produced by the Danish Centre for Human Rights to measure countries' formal and actual commitment to human rights standards.
- The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation maintains an international database of industrial statistics.
- Earthtrends is an international database of
environmental and environmental-governance indicators.
- Reefbase is an international database of
coral reefs, and includes information on individual state activities related to the protection of coral reefs.
- The European Health for All database contains a comprehensive series of health indicators for European countries.
- The World Health Organisation (WHO) Survey Data Centre is a portal to all World Health Survey statistics.
- The Demographic and Health Surveys Project has published multiple databases containing demographic information and HIV/AIDS measurements.
- Data and Software of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech, Inc. includes data on Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and East Timor.
- The Statewatch Database contains 24,000 records of newspaper articles related to civil and political human rights in Europe.
- Best Practices Database in Improving the Living Environment is a database of solutions to common social, economic and environmental problems related to urbanisation.
- Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank.
- Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International.
- Bribe Payers Index of Transparency International.
- Afrobarometer is an independent, non-partisan research project that produces a comparative series of national public attitude surveys on democracy, markets and civil society in Africa.
- Eurobarometer is produced by the European Commission to monitor public opinion in the European Union on issues relating to European integration and attitudes towards the EU, its institutions and its policies.
- Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Database is designed to provide an indicator of government human rights practices.
- Governance Matters V (1996-2005) of the World Bank Institute provides periodic cross-country estimates of six dimensions of governance, as well as access to a large dataset of underlying individual sources of governance data.
- World Governance Assessment is produced by the Overseas Development Institute to establish how the quality of governance varies over time in countries around the world.
The list here is not comprehensive but serves as an example of the depth and breadth of data and indicators available, from individual-level records to national aggregates, in terms of depth, and from general-governance indicators to coral-reef policies, in terms of breadth.
In many cases, data collected by non-governmental organisations will be qualitative; for the researcher to use those data to develop quantitative indicators and statistics, he/she will need to code the data prior to data entry. Examples of best practices for coding, including the development of a controlled vocabulary, are given in the recommended reading listed below.
1. Ball, P. and Asher, J., "Statistics and Slobodan: Using Data Analysis and Statistics in the War Crimes Trial
of Former President Milosevic," Chance, 15, 2002, p 17-24.
2. Ball, P., Betts, W., Scheuren, F., Dudukovich, J., and Asher, J., Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo March - June 1999: A Report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, 2002, p 5.
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