The report summarizes the work carried on by the WEIS project since 1968. The specific topics discussed are (1) receiving and storing international relations information on computers in serialized data sets; (2) data retrieval and tabulation; and (3) event-data analysis, including monitoring and projecting event flows. In addition, the report presents the Project's views regarding foreign policy decision-making and executing adaptive foreign policies.
The World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) Project is a research program examining international system characteristics and processes. Specifically, the data collected in the WEIS Project are public events reported daily in the press. The data reflect the flow of action and response between countries. One basic theoretical assumption underlying the project is that in the international political system, nations act consistently enough so that their past behavior is a source for the prediction of their present and future actions. Thus a country's external 'performance characteristics' in dealing with a wide variety of situations and with other countries are conceived to be made up of combinations of 'primary actions' that are categorized explicitly. These combinations of 'primary actions' are expected to fit together with those other countries in patterns of interaction. The purpose of the research is to discover if these theoretically expected characteristics and patterns make regular appearances in international relations. (Author) and patterns make regular appearances in international relations. (Author).
Previous reports have outlined the theoretical basis of the program and the research procedures for event/interaction analysis. The report discusses the status of the data collection. The main data collection consists of 18,007 interaction items coded according to the WEIS (World Event/Interaction Survey) categorization system and taken from the daily New York Times for the three year period 1966, 1967, and 1968. The items are summarized in descriptive form and coded for computer analyses, as outlined in Technical Report no. 1. The descriptive accounts of the interaction items for 1967 are presented as a display of the data included in the collection. The distribution of the items by month for the three year period are presented and indicate an average of 500 items per month.
