AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Measurement and Statistical Analysis of
Human Rights: A Model

Thursday, 8 March 2007

Speaker

Brian J. Grim, Ph.D.
Senior Research Fellow, Religion and World Affairs
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
1615 L Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036
bgrim@pewforum.org

Discussant

Arthur J. Kendall, Ph.D.
Social Consultants Research
6703 Forest Hill Drive
University Park, MD 20782
art@drkendall.org

Time

12:30-2:00PM

Location

Bureau of Labor Statistics
Conference Center, Room 9
2 Massachusetts Avenue, NE

To attend, at least 2 days in advance of the seminar you must either e-mail your name, affiliation, and name of seminar to wss_seminar@bls.gov or call 202-691-7524 and leave a message. Bring a photo ID to the seminar.

Sponsors

Washington Statistical Society
SHR-AAAS
DC-AAPOR
CASPA

Abstract

The study of human rights violations and the development of statistical models that can offer explanations are severely handicapped by a lack of adequate data. Most information on human rights is embedded in qualitative reports. Quantitative data that do exist tend to be limited to rough counts of violations or numeric indexes with little if any methodological transparency. This presentation will describe an extensive and rigorous coding project which uses the annual U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Reports as the primary information source and the procedures developed to check the coded data against alternative sources. The usefulness of these coded data will be demonstrated by testing an explanatory theory of religious persecution using structural equation modeling. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of how this research could be extended to the measurement and statistical analysis of other human rights.

(site updated 11/27/2006)