Miller points out that the quantitative analysis of terrorism frequently focuses on terrorist attacks as the unit of analysis, rarely examining terrorist organizations. Using the GTD, she examines the terrorist activity of 557 organizations that were active for at least 1 year between 1970 and 2008. Much like research on conventional crime, prior research on terrorism has focused almost exclusively on the onset of criminal behavior and has neglected determinants of declining activity. Miller hypothesizes that organizations that attack more rapidly and more frequently will last longer. Using dual group-based trajectory models she calculates the annual ratio of attacks to attacks-at-peak for each organization in order to isolate patterns of onset and decline, independent of the absolute magnitude of activity. Miller explores the extent to which the ways that terrorist organizations begin can be used to predict how they will end. …show more content…
Their study illustrates how official homicide and open-source terrorism data on homicides can be synthesized and compared quantitatively to address important theoretical and policy questions. The authors innovatively used multiple imputation by chained equations and logistic regression to impute missing values and estimate models to compare the two homicide types on 12 different victim, offender, and event characteristics. Gruenewald and Pridemore found that compared to other homicides, far-right terrorist homicides were significantly more likely to have white offenders, multiple victims, multiple offenders, and to occur between strangers, and they were significantly less likely to have white victims, to be carried out with a firearm, and to occur in cities with more than 100,000