 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