Research in the field of extremism studies have steadily progressed as it emerged from the main field of terrorism studies. This progression has gone from defining terrorism and its root causes; to measuring cognitive and behavioral indicators which may predict the likelihood of radicalization toward extremism. This comes after tedious debates about typology and causes of terrorism in the field, there are still challenges to overcome as most research relies on open-source data. Through efforts to make this field more established the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) stands out as a standard for this pursuit having some of the best open-source data and widespread usage. The database captures extremist violence from 1990 to 2014 and is a relational database that links event level data to individual offender level data. This database created by Freilich and colleagues (2014) has resulted in the ability to conduct quantitative analysis beyond descriptive statistics. The main question: are there differences in these risk and protective factors that lead to non-violent or violent outcomes of offenders in this sample? These nuances in the frequency of factors may explain why an individual followed the offending trajectory and if these differences explain offending.
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