A Study of Crisis

Problem-Based Learning Exercise #2 - Examining Violence and the Use of Force in International Crises

POLS 5320 - International Conflict and Cooperation

Assignment for March 3rd Session

This exercise narrows your examination to a specific subset of ICB variables:  ones focusing on the use of force and prevalence of violence in international crisis.   Most of the variables you will want to investigate for this assignment are located on the screens that come up when you click on the "Crisis Overview," "Crisis Trigger and Behavior," "Crisis Characteristics" links on the left margin.  The main variables I expect that you will find useful are:  Crisis Management Technique, Major Response, Centrality of Violence, Severity of Violence, Level of Violence, Gravity of Threat, Protracted Conflict, Trigger, and Timing of Violence.  Feel free to use any others variables that you find useful and related to the ideas you are investigating.

Put simply, I would like you to take some subset of cases (e.g., go to the Search function and select some set of cases, but remember to "record" what you serached for) and examine them for "eyeball" correlations relating to the use of force and prevalence of violence.  What hypotheses might you generate from these cases about this set of topics?   Please try to generate at least two hypotheses that we might later test using SPSS.

A further note:  Some of you may have questions about the coding of particular variables or other features of the ICB dataset.  Please keep a running list of these questions and raise them in class for the entire group to discuss.   Such questions provide an excellent way for us to focus on the positive and negative aspects of large scale data analysis.  They will likely be of interest to the entire class and provide me with an excellent student-driven teaching tool.