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AAAS Science and Human Rights 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

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.

 

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