Foundational to START's efforts to educate students and inform counterterrorism policy and practice is our focus on high-quality empirical research. START takes a multidisciplinary and mixed-methods approach (including qualitative and quantitative methods) to generate new and objective data and analyses, which we then package and disseminate to benefit national security professionals, students, and the academic community.
START's ethos of sharing data and tailoring analysis has resulted in a highly collaborative network of students, practitioners and academics; the resulting dialog enhances the rigor, relevance and impact of START research.
Examples include the development of empirically-based online tools such as:
- The GTD Portal, which allows students, scholars and analysts to query the data or download the entire dataset for further analysis;
- The Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the U.S. portal currently under development which brings together and visualizes four disparate U.S.-focused datasets; and
- The searchable I-VEO Knowledge Matrix which students and professionals can use to examine various counterterrorism strategies.
A list of START datasets and tools can be found here.
START also offers a variety of trainings to help others conduct analysis on data. More information can be found on the Training Page.