Niguidula+Preliminary+Research+Plan

Understanding violence against park rangers

Research Topic: I will be researching the violent line-of-duty deaths of park rangers. I will attempt to identify any trends in the data using statistical methods,

Research Questions: How can we better protect our "natural heritage"? What are the main reasons that park rangers are being attacked? How can death toll be reduced without compromising park safety?

Plan of direction: Using publicly available data about ranger deaths in the United States, I will plot the number of ranger deaths due to stabbing and gunfire over time and run statistical analyses on them to see if there are any significant trends. I will then hypothesize about the cause of any trends I find and research as many of the deaths as possible using news articles which will hopefully provide some insight into how and why the crime occurred. I will categorize the reasons for the deaths and analyze this data to see what trends emerge. The trends that appear will hopefully confirm or deny my hypothesis. Regardless of results, I will do further research into how ranger deaths could be prevented keeping in mind my previous findings. The final paper will detail any conclusions I come up with.

Preliminary Sources I haven't been able to find any peer-reviewed sources about this issue specifically, but this [|news article] about the rising murder rate of park rangers world wide and this [|website], the Officer Down Memorial Page which provides tragic, but detailed statistics and accounts of law enforcement officials (including rangers) killed in the line of duty, will be useful starting points for the project.