Research assistants for the 2012-2013 year are: Daniel Arnon, Gray Barrett, Minori Hinds, and Kelsey Tavares of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Alexander Liffiton and Rachel Olson of Arizona State University, Max Scott of the London School of Economics, and Shea Streeter, a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame.
Due to the contextual nature of the source data, coding is highly subjective, and coders are instructed to ignore their own personal biases or knowledge when determining a country's score.
Due to this fact, it may be difficult to score countries when it is not immediately clear which groups are committing acts of violence.
Therefore, Colombia's score reflects the close level of involvement between government and private actors.
[8] Another challenge is that the Political Terror Scale only measures actual violations of physical or integrity rights or acts of violence and therefore countries ruled by truly repressive and coercive regimes may receive low scores.