Creating a Composite Index for Assessing Country Performance in the Field of Human Rights: Proposal for a New Methodology

• Published in: Human rights quarterly 1994-02, Vol.16 (1), p.131-162
• Main Authors: Gupta, Dipak K., Jongman, Albert J., Schmid, Alex P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abuse; Academic freedom; Civil Rights; Countries; Freedom; Freedom of assembly; Freedom of association; Freedom of choice; Freedom of the press; Human Rights; Human rights violations; Indexes (Measures); Methodology (Data analysis); Methodology (Data collection); Religious freedom; Sociology; Sociology of law and criminology; Sociology of law and justice; Statistics; World Problems
• ISSN: 0275-0392; 1085-794X
• DOI: 10.2307/762414

This article sets out to provide a new methodology for attributing weights to the various indicators of human rights abuse. A number of studies have already collected data on various indicators of human rights abuse. These studies fall short, however, because they do not attribute weight to these indicators, and thus produce neither a composite indicator nor a group classification of countries according to their overall levels of performance. Relative weights can be attributed to these indicators in one of two ways. First, indicators can be weighted to reflect the values of the one constructing the index--an arbitrary scale. Alternatively, our methodology defines the extreme ends of the spectrum of human rights records by some widely acceptable standard, and then assesses the weights for the whole spectrum through Discriminant Analysis. Although this methodology will not end all the controversies on giving each human right indicator its relative place, nor rank individual countries on a world scale, this method is a step closer to a more objective measurement of human rights performance.