INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGIES FOR ASSESSING RADICALIZATION RISK: RISK TERRAIN MODELING AND CONJUNCTIVE ANALYSIS

The goal of this project is to understand and compare community characteristics where terrorists’ precursor activities occur versus the places where terrorist events actually take place. In this study, the applicant proposes to extract thousands of terrorism related precursor events and terrorist incident activities (most of which include geographic identifiers) from the American Terrorism Study and run two types of exploratory techniques to analyze the data: Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations (CACC) and Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM). These analytical methods will be used to answer six research questions. These include examination and comparison of community characteristics, built environment, and micro-level factors in locations where precursor activities occur and where acts of terrorism occur. Terrorism data will be obtained through the American Terrorism Study and community/environmental data will be derived from the US Census, InfoGroup and open access data portals. The applicant hopes to close a significant gap in understanding the differences between where precursor activities occurs versus where terrorist events take place, and the community level characteristics of those locations. This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law. CA/NCF