On this Picostat.com statistics page, you will find information about the nkill.byCountryYr data set which pertains to Global Terrorism Database yearly summaries. The nkill.byCountryYr data set is found in the Ecdat R package. You can load the nkill.byCountryYr data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("nkill.byCountryYr"). This will load the data into a variable called nkill.byCountryYr. If R says the nkill.byCountryYr data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("Ecdat") and then attempt to reload the data. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the nkill.byCountryYr R data set. The size of this file is about 22,806 bytes.
Global Terrorism Database yearly summaries
Description
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD)
"is a database of incidents of terrorism
from 1970 onward". Through 2015, this
database contains information on 141,966
incidents.
terrorism
provides a few summary
statistics along with an ordered
factor methodology
, which Pape et al.
insisted is necessary, because an increase
of over 70 percent in suicide terrorism
between 2007 and 2013 is best explained by
a methodology change in GTD that occurred
on 2011-11-01; Pape's own
Suicide Attack Database
showed a 19 percent decrease over
the same period.
Usage
data(terrorism)
data(incidents.byCountryYr)
data(nkill.byCountryYr)
Format
incidents.byCountryYr
and
nkill.byCountryYr
are matrices giving
the numbes of incidents and numbers of deaths
by year and by country for 206 countries and
for all years between 1970 and 2015 except
for 1993, for which the raw data were lost.
NOTE: For nkill.byCountryYr and for
terrorism[c('nkill', 'nkill.us')], NAs in
GTD were treated as 0. Thus the actual
number of deaths were likely higher, unless
this was more than offset by incidents being
classified as terrorism, when they should not
have been.
terrorism
is a data.frame
containing the following:
- year
integer year, 1970:2014.
- methodology
-
an ordered
factor giving the
methodology / organization responsible for
the data collection for most of the given
year. The Pinkerton Global Intelligence
Service (PGIS) managed data collection
from 1970-01-01 to 1997-12-31. The
Center for Terrorism and Intelligence
Studies (CETIS) managed the project from
1998-01-01 to 2008-03-31. The Institute
for the Study of Violent Groups (ISVG)
carried the project from 2008-04-01 to
2011-10-31. The National Consortium
for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism (START) has
managed data collection since
2011-11-01. For this variable,
partial years are ignored, so
methodology
= CEDIS for
1998:2007, ISVG for 2008:2011, and
START for 2012:2014.
- method
-
a character vector consisting of
the first character of the levels
of methodology
:
c('p', 'c', 'i', 's')
- incidents
-
integer number of incidents identified
each year.
NOTE:
sum(terrorism[["incidents"]])
=
146920 = 141966 in the GTD database
plus 4954 for 1993, for which the
incident-level data were lost.
- incidents.us
-
integer number of incidents identified
each year with country_txt
=
"United States".
- suicide
-
integer number of incidents classified
as "suicide" by GTD variable
suicide
= 1. For 2007, this
is 359, the number reported by
Pape et al.
For 2013, it is 624, which is 5 more
than the 619 mentioned by Pape et al.
Without checking with the SMART
project administrators, one might
suspect that 5 more suicide incidents
from 2013 were found after the data
Pape et al. analyzed but before the
data used for this analysis.
- suicide.us
-
Number of suicide incidents by year
with country_txt
=
"United States".
- nkill
-
number of confirmed fatalities for
incidents in the given year, including
attackers =
sum(nkill, na.rm=TRUE)
in the
GTD incident data.
NOTE: nkill
in the GTD incident
data includes both perpetrators
and victims when both are available.
It includes one when only one is
available and is NA
when
neither is available. However, in
most cases, we might expect that the
more spectacular and lethal incidents
would likely be more accurately
reported. To the exent that this is
true, it means that when numbers are
missing, they are usually zero or
small. This further suggests that
the summary numbers recorded here
probably represent a slight but not
substantive undercount.
- nkill.us
-
number of U.S. citizens who died as a
result of incidents for that year =
sum(nkill.us, na.rm=TRUE)
in the
GTD incident data. (This is subject
to the same likely modest undercount
discussed with nkill
.)
- nwound
-
number of people wounded. (This is
subject to the same likely modest
undercount discussed with
nkill
.)
- nwound.us
-
Number of U.S. citizens wounded in
terrorist incidents for that year =
sum(nwound.us, na.rm=TRUE)
in
the GTD incident data. (This is
subject to the same likely modest
undercount discussed with
nkill
.)
- pNA.nkill, pNA.nkill.us,
pNA.nwound, pNA.nwound.us
-
proportion of observations by year
with missing values. These numbers
are higher for the early data than
more recent numbers. This is
particularly true for nkill.us
and nwound.us
, which exceed
90 percent for most of the period
with methodology
= 'PGIS',
prior to 1998.
- worldPopulation, USpopulation
-
Estimated de facto population in thousands
living in the world and in the US as of 1
July of the year indicated, according to
the Population Division of the Department
of Economic and Social Affairs of the
United Nations; see "Sources" below.
- worldDeathRate, USdeathRate
-
Crude death rate
(deaths per 1,000 population) worldwide
and in the US, according to the World
Bank; see "Sources" below. This World
Bank data set includes USdeathRate for
each year from 1900 to 2014.
The WorldDeathRate here were read
manually from a plot on
that web page, except for the the number for
2015, which was estimated as a reduction
of 0.73 percent from 2014, which was the
average rate of decline (ratio of two
successive years) for 1990 to 2014.
The same method was used to estimate the
USdeathRate for 2015 as the same as for
2014.
NOTE: USdeathRate is to two significant
digits only, unlike WorldDeathRate, which
has four significant digits.
- worldDeaths, USdeaths
-
number of deaths by year in the world and
US
worldDeaths =
worldPopulation * worldDeathRate.
USdeaths were computed by summing across
age groups in "Deaths_5x1.txt" for the
United States, downloaded from
http://www.mortality.org/cgi-bin/hmd/country.php?cntr=USA&level=1 from the Human
Mortality Database; see sources below.
- kill.pmp, kill.pmp.us
-
terrorism deaths per million
population worldwide and in the US =
0.001 * nkill / worldPopulation
- pkill, pkill.us
-
terrorism deaths as a proportion of
total deaths worldwide and in the US
pkill = nkill / worldDeaths
pkill.us = nkill.us / USdeaths
Details
As noted with the "description" above,
Pape et al.
noted that the GTD reported an increase in
suicide terrorism of over 70 percent
between 2007 and 2013, while their Suicide Attack Database
showed a 19 percent decrease over
the same period. Pape et al. insisted that
the most likely explanation for this
difference is the change in the
organization responsible for managing
that data collection from ISVG to START.
If the issue is restricted to how
incidents are classified as "suicide
terrorism", this concern does not affect
the other variables in this summary.
However, if it also impacts what
incidents are classified as "terrorism",
it suggests larger problems.
Source
The Global Terrorism Database
maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
(START, 2015), downloaded 2015-11-28.
The world and US population figures came from "Total Population - Both Sexes", World Population Prospects 2015, published by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations,
accessed 2016-09-05.
The World and US death rates came from
the World Bank,
accessed 2016-09-05.
Human Mortality Database. University of California, Berkeley (USA), and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany).
References
Robert Pape, Keven Ruby, Vincent Bauer and
Gentry Jenkins, "How to fix
the flaws in the Global Terrorism Database
and why it matters",
The Washington Post, August 11,
2014 (accessed 2016-01-09).
Examples
data(terrorism)
# plot deaths per million population plot(kill.pmp~year, terrorism,
pch=method, type='b')
plot(kill.pmp.us~year, terrorism,
pch=method, type='b',
log='y', las=1)
# terrorism as parts per 10,000
# of all deaths plot(pkill*1e4~year, terrorism,
pch=method, type='b',
las=1)
plot(pkill.us*1e4~year, terrorism,
pch=method, type='b',
log='y', las=1)
# plot number of incidents, number killed,
# and proportion NAplot(incidents~year, terrorism, type='b',
pch=method)plot(nkill.us~year, terrorism, type='b',
pch=method)
plot(nkill.us~year, terrorism, type='b',
pch=method, log='y')plot(pNA.nkill.us~year, terrorism, type='b',
pch=method)
abline(v=1997.5, lty='dotted', col='red')
# by country by year
data(incidents.byCountryYr)
data(nkill.byCountryYr)yr <- as.integer(colnames(
incidents.byCountryYr))
str(maxDeaths <- apply(nkill.byCountryYr,
1, max) )
str(omax <- order(maxDeaths, decreasing=TRUE))
head(maxDeaths[omax], 8)
tolower(substring(
names(maxDeaths[omax[1:8]]), 1, 2))
pch. <- c('i', 'g', 'f', 'l',
's', 'c', 'u', 'p')
cols <- 1:4matplot(yr, sqrt(t(
nkill.byCountryYr[omax[1:8], ])),
type='b', pch=pch., axes=FALSE,
ylab='(square root scale) ', xlab='',
col=cols,
main='number of terrorism deaths\nby country')
axis(1)
(max.nk <- max(nkill.byCountryYr[omax[1:8], ]))
i.nk <- c(1, 100, 1000, 3000,
5000, 7000, 10000)
cbind(i.nk, sqrt(i.nk))
axis(2, sqrt(i.nk), i.nk, las=1)
ip <- paste(pch., names(maxDeaths[omax[1:8]]))
legend('topleft', ip, cex=.55,
col=cols, text.col=cols)
--
Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.