What Online Surveys Can Tell Us About Violence, Unrest, and Human Rights
In this working paper, Andrew Shaver, an assistant professor at UC Merced, and a team of researchers from the Political Violence Lab, draw conclusions based on surveys they ran in Bangladesh and Pakistan in an attempt to uncover instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed or excluded from major news media reporting.
DownloadEfforts to collect data on political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses are fraught with challenges, and many studies rely on data from news reports which are known to be biased in aggregate. In this working paper, Andrew Shaver, an assistant professor at UC Merced, alongside co-authors Claudia Loomis, Eliot Jobe, and research interns at the Political Violence Lab, explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. They ran surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan amid political turmoil and partnered with local journalists working on both countries to verify the uncovering instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missing from major news media and ultimately major datasets derived from it.
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