Units of Analysis

xSub spatial panel datasets are available at multiple levels of analysis, which users can customize to their needs. The spatio-temporal resolution of the panel data can thus range from macro-level (e.g. country-year) to meso-level (e.g. province-month) and micro-level (e.g. grid-week).

Spatial units:

  • country [adm0]: country or national level

  • province [adm1]: 1st order administrative division (e.g. U.S. state)

  • district [adm2]: 2nd order administrative division (e.g. U.S. county)

  • grid cell [priogrid]: 0.5 x 0.5 decimal degree regular grid (PRIO-GRID)

  • electoral constituency [clea]: geographic units used by the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA)

Temporal units:

  • year

  • month

  • week

  • day

Output datasets feature violent event counts and local demographic, geographic, ethnic and weather variables, aggregated to the user’s preferred units. For example, if the user selects “Space: district” and “Time: week”, the dataset will include repeated weekly observations for each district, with the total number of violent incidents at each time period (broken down by actor and tactics), and local average statistics for weather and other covariates.

xSub event-level datasets, by construction, have no discrete units of analysis. To situate each event in space and time, all records contain geographic coordinates (longitude, latitude) and dates, along with geographic and temporal precision codes.