Methodology

The map at a glance

This map covers The State of Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management in K–12 Public Schools: Findings from a 2025 American School Leader Panel Survey, published by the RAND Corporation, Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (RR-A3658-1) in 2025. It was generated on 30 October 2026 and contains:

• 2,560 claims
• 25 sections
• 107 concepts
• 7,074 links between them
• 163 source pages

A claim is one statement the report makes, written as a short title and a plain sentence, and tied to the exact words of the report that support it. A section is one of the report's own divisions. A concept is a recurring idea, such as a term or topic, that gathers every claim mentioning it. A link connects a claim to its section, to a concept it mentions, to another claim that supports it, or to another claim it cites.

How the claims were extracted

NCIER's research pipeline works through the source report page by page and records each claim it finds together with the passage of the report that supports it. Every claim carries the report page it comes from, a type, a title, a plain-language sentence, and the supporting quote. The pipeline runs offline; this website only publishes the finished dataset and never edits it.

Claims are classified into types:

• Fact 1,804
• Statement 225
• Definition 194
• Evidence 133
• Conjecture 131
• Conclusion 73

How every quote is verified verbatim

The quote attached to a claim must be the report's own wording, not a paraphrase. Each quote is checked automatically against the text of the page it is attributed to, and the dataset has to pass that check for all 2,560 quotes: every one must be found on its page word for word.

Text taken from a PDF is not always typographically identical to the text typed into a quote, so both sides go through the same normalization before they are compared. Normalization changes only how characters are written, never which words are present:

1. Curly single and double quotation marks are straightened to plain ' and " characters.
2. Hyphen, non-breaking hyphen, figure dash, en dash, em dash, horizontal bar and minus sign are all treated as a plain hyphen.
3. Non-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces.
4. Table column separators (vertical bars) are replaced by a single space.
5. Runs of spaces, tabs and line breaks are collapsed into a single space, and leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed.
6. All letters are case-folded to lower case.

After normalization the quote must appear in the page text exactly. Reworded, shortened or reordered text does not pass. The check also confirms that every claim's section, concepts and supporting claims exist, so no link points nowhere.

Tags: verbatim-supported and inferred

Every claim carries one of two tags, shown in square brackets. The quote is always the report's exact wording; the tag says how closely the claim sentence follows it.

• [V] Verbatim-supported (2,538 claims): the quoted words state the claim directly.
• [I] Inferred (22 claims): the quote supports the claim, but the claim goes beyond the exact words. Every inferred claim states the reason, so a reader can judge the step for themselves. See all inferred claims and their reasons.

How page highlights were located

Each claim's quote was located on the image of its source page, and the highlight is stored as one or more rectangles measured as fractions of the page's width and height. The page images are the report's pages exactly as published; the highlights are drawn over them on this site and never baked into the image. 163 source pages are published at two sizes.

The way each highlight was located is recorded with the claim:

• Exact (1,586 claims): the quoted words were found as one continuous passage on the page.
• Table row (930 claims): the quote comes from a table, so the whole table row is highlighted.
• Clauses (3 claims): the quote is made of separate clauses, and each clause is highlighted where it appears.

Claims with no highlight

For 41 of the 2,560 claims the highlight step found no match on the page image, so those 41 claims have no highlight. Their source is artwork, such as a figure or graphic, rather than running text, and the quote could not be tied to a rectangle. Their quotes are still verified against the page text like every other claim; they are shown without a highlighted page thumbnail.

• p050-14 report p. 50: Fig 5.5 Team composition (average team members): other states 4.9, encouraged states 5.2, early legi
• p085-01 report p. 85: Figure 11.4 layout: Elementary and Secondary dot-plot panels, percentage of schools
• p085-02 report p. 85: Figure 11.4 legend: low-severity Scenario A, high-severity H (elementary); I and P (secondary)
• p087-01 report p. 87: Figure 11.5 layout: box plots of number of interventions (0 to 16) by scenario and level
• p087-02 report p. 87: Figure 11.5 key: whiskers show range; box top 75th percentile; line median; box bottom 25th
• p087-03 report p. 87: Figure 11.5 color coding: A, B, I low; C-G and J-O medium; H and P high
• p090-01 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario A (Elementary): temporary removal 11, permanent removal 2 (percent of schools)
• p090-02 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario B (Elementary): temporary removal 30, permanent removal 2 (percent of schools)
• p090-03 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario C (Elementary): temporary removal 32, permanent removal 1 (percent of schools)
• p090-04 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario D (Elementary): temporary removal 21, permanent removal 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-05 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario E (Elementary): temporary removal 16, permanent removal 0 (percent of schools)
• p090-06 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario F (Elementary): temporary removal 45, permanent removal 7 (percent of schools)
• p090-07 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario G (Elementary): temporary removal 29, permanent removal 5 (percent of schools)
• p090-08 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario H (Elementary): temporary removal 70, permanent removal 15 (percent of...
• p090-09 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario I (Secondary): temporary removal 8, permanent removal 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-10 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario J (Secondary): temporary removal 60, permanent removal 12 (percent of schools)
• p090-11 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario K (Secondary): temporary removal 9, permanent removal 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-12 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario L (Secondary): temporary removal 56, permanent removal 11 (percent of schools)
• p090-13 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario M (Secondary): temporary removal 48, permanent removal 8 (percent of schools)
• p090-14 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario N (Secondary): temporary removal 27, permanent removal 12 (percent of schools)
• p090-15 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario O (Secondary): temporary removal 52, permanent removal 24 (percent of schools)
• p090-16 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario P (Secondary): temporary removal 73, permanent removal 19 (percent of schools)
• p090-17 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario A (Elementary): law enforcement action 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-18 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario B (Elementary): law enforcement action 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-19 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario C (Elementary): law enforcement action 15 (percent of schools)
• p090-20 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario D (Elementary): law enforcement action 3 (percent of schools)
• p090-21 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario E (Elementary): law enforcement action 9 (percent of schools)
• p090-22 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario F (Elementary): law enforcement action 22 (percent of schools)
• p090-23 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario G (Elementary): law enforcement action 17 (percent of schools)
• p090-24 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario H (Elementary): law enforcement action 41 (percent of schools)
• p090-25 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario I (Secondary): law enforcement action 5 (percent of schools)
• p090-26 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario J (Secondary): law enforcement action 32 (percent of schools)
• p090-27 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario K (Secondary): law enforcement action 4 (percent of schools)
• p090-28 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario L (Secondary): law enforcement action 26 (percent of schools)
• p090-29 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario M (Secondary): law enforcement action 13 (percent of schools)
• p090-30 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario N (Secondary): law enforcement action 25 (percent of schools)
• p090-31 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario O (Secondary): law enforcement action 52 (percent of schools)
• p090-32 report p. 90: Figure 11.7, Scenario P (Secondary): law enforcement action 53 (percent of schools)
• p151-08 report p. 151: Early legislation states: WA, OR, NV, TX, MS, GA, FL, IL, MI, OH, PA, NY, CT, NH, KY, VA, MD, RI
• p151-09 report p. 151: States that encouraged BTAM use: MT, ID, ND, UT, CO, NE, KS, OK, NM, MO, AR, TN, IN, WV, NC, SC, VT,
• p151-10 report p. 151: Other states: CA, AZ, WY, SD, MN, IA, WI, LA, AL, AK, HI, ME, DC

Use the data

Everything on these pages comes from one dataset, which you can download and check yourself.

• claims.json The full dataset with absolute URLs
• claims.csv One row per claim
• graph.json Nodes and links behind the explorer
• llms.txt Plain-text guide for AI crawlers

Explore the graph Back to the map overview