Editor’s Introduction: Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Terrorism

Abstract

Although criminological research on terrorism has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, it has generally not been noteworthy as an area that has generated cutting edge methodological and statistical innovations. In an encyclopedic review of research on terrorism, Schmid and Jongman (1988:177) identified more than 6,000 published works but point out that much of the research is ‘‘impressionistic, superficial (and offers) ... far-reaching generalizations on the basis of episodic evidence.’’ More recently, Silke (2001) concluded that only three percent of articles in journals that reported terrorism research used inferential statistical analysis compared to 86% of articles in forensic psychology and 60% in criminology. Victoroff (2005:34) similarly concluded that there were more psychological terrorism theories than empirical studies, and ‘‘even the small amount of psychological research is largely flawed, rarely having been based on scientific methods using normal and validated measures of psychological states, comparing direct examination of individuals with appropriate controls, and testing hypotheses with accepted statistical methods.’’ Lum et al. (2006) reviewed more than 20,000 articles on terrorism published between 1971 and 2004 and found that only seven met their criteria of being moderately rigorous evaluation studies. But as the contributions to this special issue of the JQC illustrate, the situation with regard to quantitative approaches to the study of terrorism has begun to rapidly change. Spurred on by expanded funding opportunities, especially from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate, the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, we are witnessing a huge growth in the depth and sophistication of the criminological research literature on terrorism. These developments have also been aided by the creation of DHS’s Centers of Excellence program, and more recently, by the Department of Defense funded Minerva program. Research on terrorism arguably represents one of the major growth areas in social science scholarship