EUGene notes: Discrepancy in including certain target dyads in version 1.94 and 1.95
Q: Why didn’t version 1.94 and 1.95 include all dyads involving joiners even though I specified “include joiners” in the specification?
A: EUGene distinguishes between originators and joiners. EUGene prompts for whether the final data set should include cases with just originators, or originators and joiners. But it turned out not to be entirely clear what this meant, and version 1.94 changed the way certain cases were handled in comparison to prior versions. This wasn’t really a bug (dealing with the class of cases described below is problematic) but was a discrepancy between versions. Version 2.0 returns the way these cases are handled to the pre-v1.94 method. Essentially, the “Include All Joiner Dyads” button was not including cases where the dyad was between an initiator who was an originator and a target who was a joiner.
NOTE: This discrepancy was only a problem for users who were selecting “directed dyads” or “directed dispute dyad data” for output, with “Side A as initiators” selected for coding initiators,” AND WHO WERE INCLUDING JOINERS IN DATASET CREATION AND ANALYSIS. This is not an issue for nondirected dyads, nor is it an issue when analyzing dispute initiation involving only dispute originators. This is not an issue for nondirected dyads. It was also not an issue if you selected “revisionist states” as the initiators, rather than side A; in this case the “Include All Joiner Dyads” selection worked as it had in v1.19.
More precisely, the problematic cases that were not included in output from version 1.94-1.95 regardless of user settings for joiners and initiators were directed dyads ccode1 vs. ccode3 where ccode1 was an originator against ccode2, and ccode3 joined in on the side of ccode2 later. Consider the following sequence of events:
Day 1: US starts dispute vs. Russia.
Day 2: Britain joins US.
Day 3: China joins Russia.
Consider the following possible dyads over the course of this dispute:
Day 1: US Russia
This dyad is coded with no problem, this is a “true” initiation. If no joiners are coded as being initiators, then this dyad is the only one reported as a directed initiation.
Day 2: US Russia Britain Russia
Here, Britain is on the initiating side, but joined rather than initiated. These dyads are captured OK in all versions with the setting to treat joiners on the initiating side as initiators. If no joiners are coded as being initiators, then this dyad is not reported as an initiation
Day 3: US Russia Britain Russia US China Britain China
This is the situation where 2 questions come up.
- Do we code an initiation from US to China? Certainly not if we are excluding consideration of any joiners. But what if we want to include joiners? Did US “join” as an initiator? Sort of – the US-China dyad is clearly a “joiner” dyad, but the US isn’t the state actively joining, rather, the US gained another target. The US China dyad is not a normal initiation, because China joined on the target side. But if we mark the setting “include all joiners” then this dyad should be included somehow. The discrepancy in EUGene came in here – the US-China dyad was included in v 1.19, but was excluded by v 1.95. It has been added and is included in output in version 2.0.
- What about coding initiation from Britain to China? Britain and China are both joiners. EUGene v 1.19 and 1.95 both report this dyad as an initiation given the setting to treat joiners as initiators, and to include all joiner dyads. In version 1.95 this was inconsistent with case 1, though, because in both case it is the target state that did the joining.
To resolve the discrepancy between situations 1 and 2, in version 2.0 (as in version 1.19 and before) all four of the dyads [US-Russia, Britain-Russia, US-China, and Britain-China] are included in output if the user selects “Include All Joiner Dyads” in setting output specifications.