whittle_conflicts_hostility: Whittle Duplicate Conflict-Years by Conflict Hostility

In peacesciencer: Tools and Data for Quantitative Peace Science Research

Whittle Duplicate Conflict-Years by Conflict Hostility

Description

whittle_conflicts_hostility() 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 hostility.

Usage

whittle_conflicts_hostility(data)

wc_hostility(...)

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().

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

Value

whittle_conflicts_hostility() 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 or third cut (after whittling onsets in whittle_conflicts_onsets() the extent to which dispute-level hostility 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_hostility()

cow_mid_dirdisps %>% whittle_conflicts_onsets() %>% whittle_conflicts_hostility()

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