A source of data from this effort would be a collection of experts on terrorism, known collectively as a red team. These experts will answer a survey which relate to the different theories under debate. They would be asked to fill out the survey as if they were bomber recruiters themselves. The experts would be given background about the organization they are asked to emulate, in this case Hamas. Their responses will be put into the PLS path model and analyzed, in the same way that data from a bomber biography would be analyzed.
The survey will be a self-administered survey, meaning that
individuals will take the survey and turn-in responses, rather than interacting with a surveyor. The answers to the questions are on a 1-4 Liekert scale, and will reflect the “status” or “strength” for each of the associated latent variables. The survey and supporting materials will take approximately 30 minutes to read and complete.
The participants themselves would be people who are judged to have reasonable ability to answer the surveys intelligently and have no influencing political agenda to start with. Candidates would include those identified as experts on terrorism preferably with background in the subject of suicide bombing and/or Hamas, or general Middle Eastern experts with knowledge of Palestine. To best fit with the PLS analysis, between 50 to 100 expert participants would be needed. This results from this part of the methodology are not yet complete, so the following section is devoted to presentation of the initial results from the biography analysis.
