Examining Radicalization's Risk and Protective Factors: A Case-Control Study of Violent Extremists, Non-Violent Criminal Extremists, Non-Offending Extremists, and Regular Violent Offenders, United States, 1990-2020 (ICPSR 39026)
This project examined the multidimensional pathways that led to extremism and extremist behaviors. The focus of the research was to examine risk and protective factors that either directly, or in combination, interact to increase or mitigate the risk of radicalization and terrorism.
This project comparatively examined the presence/absence of risk and protective factors across three groups:
- extremist individuals who committed ideologically motivated violent (fatal and non-fatal violent attacks) and nonviolent (financial) crimes
- extremists who did not break the law and only engaged in legal extremist activities
- persons who committed non-ideological motivated homicides and other violent attacks
Thus, researchers accomplished four major goals/objectives in this project. First, although there has been a good amount of radicalization and risk assessment-related research on risk and protective factors, researchers expanded this work with comparative analyses that have not been previously explored. Second, few studies compared violent or nonviolent criminal extremists to nonoffending extremists or other types of violent offenders. Third, researchers used a case-control approach to provide an empirically robust understanding of categorical differences across groups that have not yet been achieved. Fourth, researchers examined differences in participation of warning behaviors across the groups studied.
The data file includes 971 cases.
Investigating Root Causes of School Violence: A Case-Control Study of School Violence Offenders, Non-School Youth Violence Offenders, and Non-Offending Youths, United States, 1990-2020 (ICPSR 39020)
This study investigated root causes of school shootings by using a case-control methodology to compare 157 adolescent school shooters (cases) to samples of two key comparison groups: 157 non-school adolescent shooting offenders and 157 non-offending youths who attended the same school as the school shooter (controls) in the United States between 1990 and 2020 (overall n=471). Specifically, the researchers compared:
- Adolescent school shooters who committed shootings both fatal and non-fatal to adolescents who committed shootings both fatal and non-fatal outside school grounds in the community.
- Adolescent school shooters who committed homicide to adolescents who committed shooting homicides outside school grounds in the community.
- Adolescent school shooters who caused non-fatal injuries to adolescents who committed non-fatal shootings with injuries outside school grounds in the community.
- Adolescent school shooters to non-offending students from the same school.
All groups were compared on items theorized to be risk and protective factors to crime based on major criminology theories, such as social learning, general strain, social control, bio-social, life course, and psychology. Building upon the methodology used in The American School Shooting Study (TASSS), this study relied on open-source, content analysis research methods to obtain all publicly available information on the sampled individuals. Files were collected from over 60 databases, major search engines, and archival resources, which were then reviewed and coded by the research team for evidence of risk and protective factors.