World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) Project, 1966-1978

The WEIS Project dataset is a record of the flow of action and response between countries (as well as non-governmental actors, e.g., NATO) reflected in public events reported daily in the New York Times from January 1966 through December 1978. The WEIS Project began under the direction of Charles McClelland at the University of Southern California as a research project on international system characteristics and processes. The unit of analysis in the dataset is the event/interaction, referring to words and deeds communicated between nations, such as threats of military force. Each event/interaction is a daily report of an international event. There are 98,043 events included in this dataset. Coded for each event are the actor, target, date, action category, and arena. Also provided are brief textual descriptions for each event.