Download Cautionary Notes

Cautionary Notes for Potential Users of Dynamics of Collective Action Data
January 8, 2010
Susan Olzak
1. First, and most importantly, these data are at the event level, which means that characteristics
of particular events do not always map onto social movement organizational actors or social
movement issues easily. For example, for a very complex event with many different types of
participants and many different kinds of claims, our coding scheme provides for up to 4 claims
and up to 3 different initiating groups (each of which could have 2 characteristics). Thus, all
claim types that reflect your research interests should be explored initially and all initiating
groups of interest should also be explored.
2. For studying a specific social movement or type of protest, we suggest using multiple
dimensions of the events and actors to capture all events. Thus, anti-gay events can be found
by searching for a specific claim by instigators (claim in the 1600s), or by victims of attack (claim
2525). There are many possible interpretations of a given social movement field and we suggest
making a full list of all possible characteristics and relevant variables associated with these
characteristics that might conceivably lead you to an event that is relevant to your study.
3. We have tried very hard to develop a set of hypotheses regarding sources of systematic coding
errors; however, we are quite sure that many coding errors remain. We believe that there are a
number of areas that are particularly prone to contain error and thus need to be checked for
internal consistency and perhaps also against other independent news sources available online.
Variables that seem to involve the most confusion on the part of coders were: valence,
estimated number of participants, and duplicate events.
A. Valence: this measure seemed to be most confusing when there was an “anti” modifier
listed for the claim or issue in the Coding Manual. The valence code can take on 3 values,
val1 coded 1 means that protesters favored this claim and it refers to claim1
val1 coded 2 means that protesters opposed this claim and it refers to claim1
val1 coded 3 means that protesters’ support (or opposition) was ambiguous with
respect to claim1.
There are 4 valence variables (val1, val2, val3, val4 which correspond to claim1claim4) Note also we attempted to word each claim in accordance with how a given
social movement or group might endorse them. All possible combinations of claims,
targets, and valences should be explored to capture all of the nuances of a given
event. For more detailed explanations of our coding rules, see the Coding Manual,
also found on this project website. To make these issues more concrete, below we
describe several concrete problems that we encountered when coding valence:
1. An event that is in protest of a previous anti-gay attack the anti-gay movement with
a claim1 of 2525 (hate crime attack on gays) that has a val1=2 would indicate that
participants at this event were expressing protest against some gay attack. Because
a protest against an anti-gay attack is consistent with an event having a pro-gay
claim, this same event may also have a second claim, so that claim2=1600, with a
val2=1. Or, coders may have identified claim1=1600 and claim2=2525. All valence
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values should be checked against all claims and targets by scanning the article’s title
to see if the valence has been coded correctly. In this example, the combinations of
claims and valences yield the same basic characterization of the event. In particular,
we suggest that all possibly relevant claims, targets, and valences of the types of
events you wish to analyze should be identified using the Coding Manual and
Codebook.
2. Note also that the valence code of “03" will primarily be used for sub-codes of
claims found under “Social 1300", “Anti-Ethnic Attacks/Hate or Bias Crimes 2500",
and “Other 1400" since the valence of these issues were often difficult to
determine.
B. Number of participants and estimated number of participants. This should always be
checked for internal consistency, however, we note that reported crowd size should always
be interpreted cautiously, and is, in reality, always an estimate (by police, reporters, or bystanders). The “number of participants reported” measure literally means that a number
was cited in the article and does not refer to accuracy of that report.
C. Duplicate Events. While we made every effort to identify and delete duplicate events
(coding records of the same event, at the same time, in the same location, with the same
characteristics), because students encountered multiple reports about the same event, we
suspect that many duplicates remain in the dataset. Sorting by date and location and other
relevant characteristics will help identify any remaining duplication events.
4. We believe these data are a “work in progress” and we absolutely welcome all users to send us
accounts of errors in the various categories of characteristics. We will need you to provide
specific details, including links to newspaper articles or pdf’s of newspaper articles, as well as
your suggestions for particular changes to the existing codes. We will periodically update the
data and will update our version numbers to reflect these changes.
5. Qualitative Text Variables (who, what, where, against, purpose, and why) are unfortunately
unavailable for events that took place during the years 1968-1973. These data were
inadvertently lost due to changes in Research Assistant personnel and changes in our data entry
software programs.
6. We are also interested in “filling in” any characteristics that might be coded as missing. For
example, name of a neighborhood where the event took place. Again, documentation from a
newspaper or archival source is needed to help us track down new information, so please
provide this if you make a suggestion to change one or more codes.
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