Recent Scientific Accomplishments

Dugan’s research examines the causes and consequences of violence using complex data sources. Her work has fallen under 1) personal violence and victimization and 2) political and social violence. Dugan has studied the causal connection between the rising availability of domestic violence resources in the U.S. and the decreasing rates of intimate partner homicide. In several articles published in Homicide Studies, Law and Society Review, and Criminology and Public Policy, she examines these relationships and unexpectedly finds that domestic violence services are helpful to some and harmful to others depending on race and sex. Further research published in Criminology reveals that the violent victimization experiences of women also differ by race and ethnicity; and that help-seeking behavior depends on the sex of the victim and the relational distance between the victim and offender. Dugan’s other work began when she and Gary LaFree acquired the only open source terrorism incident database that includes both international and domestic attacks from 1970 to 1997. No other dataset like this exists, providing an unmatched opportunity to assess the causes and consequences of terrorism, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of counter-terrorist efforts. Other databases follow a shorter time period or are restricted to cross-national attacks. This data provide an opportunity to apply rigorous quantitative analysis to previously unexamined areas. Dugan’s ultimate goal is to understand the social, political and economic basis of terrorism with and emphasis on the role of inequality. Current studies include calculating the trajectories of terrorism activity by countries, nationalities of targets, and by groups; modeling the desistence patterns of terrorism groups; mapping the diffusion of activity within and across a region; and estimating the financial impact of terrorism both locally and nationally. This dataset led to interest at the University of Maryland to apply for and be awarded as a Center of Excellence for the Department of Homeland Security as the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START).

Funded Research

Over the last five years, Dugan was a principal investigator or co-investigator on five grants. Three were awarded from the National Institute of Justice for both victimization and terrorism research. She also received a grant from the Bureau of Justice Statistics/American Statistical Association to fund MPCP graduate student Marybeth Mattingly for her dissertation. Finally, Dugan was also awarded a grant with Gary LaFree by the National Consortium on Violence Research to organize a workshop to bring together experts on terrorism. This workshop set the stage to apply for a larger grant from the Department of Homeland Security to establish the Center of Excellence to study terrorism (START, mentioned above). Dugan has been funded by START since the summer of 2005.

Future Plans

Dugan has several papers in both research tracks in progress and under review. She is examining the role of relational distance between perpetrator and victim in injury, as well as studying the personal impact of violence on victims. She is especially interested in determining how these effects vary across race and ethnicity. She is also estimating the impacts of several counter-terrorism strategies on continued violence, as well as estimating the economic consequences of terrorism in countries like Italy and the United States. As the maintainer of the GTD database, she is working with proprietors of other open source terrorism databases to improve collection methods and standardize across data sources to improve research reliability. She is also combining this dataset with other important global datasets such as the Polity IV and the Minorities at Risk databases to estimate the causal relationship between social, political, and economic conditions and terrorism.