whittle_conflicts_fatality: Whittle Duplicate Conflict-Years by Highest Fatality

In peacesciencer: Tools and Data for Quantitative Peace Science Research

Whittle Duplicate Conflict-Years by Highest Fatality

Description

whittle_conflicts_fatality() is in a class of do-it-yourself functions for coercing (i.e. "whittling") conflict-year data with cross-sectional units to unique conflict-year data by cross-sectional unit. The inspiration here is clearly the problem of whittling dyadic dispute-year data into true dyad-year data (like in the Gibler-Miller-Little conflict data). This particular function will keep the observations with the highest observed fatality.

Usage

whittle_conflicts_fatality(data)

wc_fatality(...)

Arguments

data	a data frame with a declared conflict attribute type.
...	optional, only to make the shortcut work

Details

Dyads are capable of having multiple disputes in a given year, which can create a problem for merging into a complete dyad-year data frame. Consider the case of France and Italy in 1860, which had three separate dispute onsets that year (MID#0112, MID#0113, MID#0306), as illustrative of the problem. The default process in peacesciencer employs several rules to whittle down these duplicate dyad-years for merging into a dyad-year data frame. These are available in add_cow_mids() and add_gml_mids().

As of writing, the Correlates of War and Gibler-Miller-Little conflict data record some -9s for fatalities. In those cases, dispute-level fatality is momentarily recoded to be .5 (i.e. fatal, but without too many fatalities). This is a missing data problem that Gibler and Miller correct in a forthcoming publication in Journal of Conflict Resolution. Until then, this function makes that kind of determination about disputes with missing fatalities.

wc_fatality() is a simple, less wordy, shortcut for the same function.

Value

whittle_conflicts_fatality() takes a dyad-year data frame or leader-dyad-year data frame with a declared conflict attribute type and, grouping by the dyad and year, returns just those observations that have the highest observed dispute-level fatality. This will not eliminate all duplicates, far from it, but it's a sensible second cut (after whittling onsets in whittle_conflicts_onsets() the extent to which dispute-level fatality is a good heuristic for dispute-level severity/importance.

Author(s)

Steven V. Miller

References

Miller, Steven V. 2021. "How peacesciencer Coerces Dispute-Year Data into Dyad-Year Data". URL: http://svmiller.com/peacesciencer/articles/coerce-dispute-year-dyad-year.html

Examples

# just call `library(tidyverse)` at the top of the your script
library(magrittr)
gml_dirdisp %>% whittle_conflicts_onsets() %>% whittle_conflicts_fatality()

cow_mid_dirdisps %>% whittle_conflicts_onsets() %>% whittle_conflicts_fatality()

peacesciencer documentation built on March 31, 2023, 8:37 p.m.