Project History
The Integrated Data for Event Analysis (IDEA) event form typology is a conceptual framework for use in coding social, economic and political events data. The IDEA framework is an extension and a refinement of, and is congruent with the World Event Interaction Survey or WEIS. Like WEIS, IDEA is nominally scaled, but unlike WEIS the IDEA event forms are not bound to state actors, though some event forms are intrinsically bound to specific actors like armed forces when they engage in a battle. To be clear, the WEIS event forms, reduction in relations, represents a diplomatic behavior and therefore represents diplomatic action, but the IDEA equivalent, reduce routine activity, refers to such reductions by individuals, groups or organizations, both state and non-state.
The extension of WEIS is represented by 2-digit residual categories beginning with number 23, and extending to 99. The first additions made were the Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action (PANDA) events that embodied the contentious and coercive but not yet violent aspects of conflict. PANDA was superseded by IDEA in its first version. Next, the event forms from Professor Charles Lewis Taylor's World Handbook of Social and Political Indicators were added, administrative adjustments, for example. In addition, we added categories deemed important in that they represented distinctive sets of behavior (for example, voting and judicial behaviors), and these are true residuals in that we have created them primarily as placeholders until we can engage scholars in these areas to help us flesh out the sub-forms. We also added in the previous version of IDEA a handful of economic behaviors (with very crude lower-form distinctions, again as placeholders). Finally, we added a series of non-human phenomena (like natural disasters and accidents) and (animal) behaviors, used primarily to track biomedical phenomena such as the benign or malicious spread of toxins or disease.
The September 2012 version of IDEA adjusts a number of operational definitions, merging a few events and adding numerous others, based on our experience over the years. This version also explicitly integrates virtually all of the Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) event forms as published in the January 2002 release available from the Penn State Event Data Project website and updated slightly in a March 2002 ISA paper by Deborah J. Gerner, Philip A. Schrodt, Ömür Yilmaz, and Rajaa Abu-Jabr. Thus cooperative actions, particularly those involving mediation, are much better covered in this version. With this version too, we have also made available the IDEA equivalents for each of the following event data frameworks: CAMEO, Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID), WEIS and World Handbook.
While dated, a reliability assessment of our parser can be found in an article by Gary King and Will Lowe "An Automated Information Extraction Tool for International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design," International Organization 57, Summer 2003, pp. 617-64. The 2013 version is the forth major revision since IDEA was first explicitly outlined in "Integrated Data for Events Analysis (IDEA): An Event Typology for Automated Events Data Development," Journal of Peace Research Vol. 40. No3, 2003. The framework below is posted as an ongoing draft, with comments, suggestions and extensions welcome. Thank you for your interest. We welcome any comments, suggestions and/or questions. E-mail Joe Bond
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Last Updated: April 30, 2013