Event frequency in ACLED closely approximates victimization intensity despite equal event weighting.

Evidence

The ACLED indicators measure the frequency of war incidents that occurred across the regions. A problematic feature of the ACLED is that all events are given the same weight regardless of their severity. Thus, the massacre in Srebrenica is treated as one event, the same as, for example, a single sniper attack in Sarajevo … However, our findings suggest that across the regions of the former Yugoslavia, frequency of war events is a good approximation of the intensity of victimization. The ACLED indicator War events strongly correlates (r ¼ .86, p < .01, Table 2) with the TRACES indicator of Exposure to war events, which directly measures the degree of individuals’ victimization across eighty regions: the regions with the highest frequency of war events are indeed the regions with the highest levels of exposure. — Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, and Dario Spini, When Is Collective Exposure to War…, 85

Categorization

• XREF: Validation of a measurement proxy against a direct measure — a methodological point relevant to using event data in conflict research. — connects to: Experiencing symmetric intergroup violence predicts greater acceptance of one’s group’s collective guilt. — Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, and Dario Spini, When Is Collective Exposure to War…, 37; Rare violent events resist prediction by their causal structure alone

Related

• Event-level classification of violence distinguishes symmetric from sequential asymmetric victimization. (similarity 0.88)
• The findings are robust across different operationalizations of war-event indicators. (similarity 0.84)
• Experiencing symmetric intergroup violence predicts greater acceptance of one’s group’s collective guilt. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Rare violent events resist prediction by their causal structure alone #corroborates (0.70)