Human rights data knowledge is important because human rights scholarship is becoming
more and more quantitative
Purposes of mentioning human rights o Description and documentation o Classification o Monitoring states’ compliance Helps figure out if treaties are effective o Mapping patterns over time and across space o Secondary analysis Analyzing for things like causality o Advocacy tool Evidence for naming and shaming o Counters anecdotal evidence Reasons to not collect data o Danger in collecting information is if you can trust people with it- Holocaust o Waste of resources and time Types of data measures o Events-based data What happened When? Who? Made based on testimonials and evidence Newspaper stories o Standard measures Qualitative data put on scales Scores on issues Tend to focus on physical integrity rights Based on events-based data Use the Amnesty International and US State Department reports] Some bias in DOS reports in 70s and 80s but bias vanished Ordinal o Surveys Specific, using questionnaires Not being used as often as other methods Problems- biases, embellishments Problems with state repression Time consuming- might be a problem with resources o Administrative and Socio-Economic Statistics About social and economic rights and basic needs Released by individual governments Can we trust these? o Crowd measures and real-time data Use of social media Documenting police encounters Challenges to measuring o Validity o Operationalization- hard to define human rights o Difficulty in getting data from non-cooperative countries o Underreporting or un-reporting o Lack of balance due to focus on certain hot button areas and underestimation of violations elsewhere- problem with using media and event data o Quantitative studies of human rights are more pessimistic about the development of human rights while qualitative studies are more optimistic o Avoiding convenience sampling o Research indicates that “information effects” are in play- the widespread discussion about human rights changes how much they are reported and reflects on the intensity of the coding Over time, human rights reports get more detailed and longer, therefore causing scores to get worse Monitors expect more of states now