National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) is a research and education center at the University of Maryland, College Park focused on the scientific study of the causes and consequences of terrorism in the United States and around the world. It maintains the Global Terrorism Database, which includes over 125,000 terrorist attacks which it describes as the "most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world."

START was launched in 2005 as one of the Centers of Excellence supported by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. Since its launch, it has been under the directorship of Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park. START received a 3-year $12 million initial grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2005 and the grant was renewed by DHS in 2008. It launched its undergraduate Terrorism Studies Minor in 2007 and its graduate certificate in 2010.

START has developed an undergraduate Global Terrorism Minor program, one of the options in the University of Maryland's Global Studies Minor program (other options include the International Development and Conflict Management minor, the International Engineering minor, the Global Poverty minor, and the Global Engineering minor). It also offers an online Gradual Certificate in Terrorism Analysis Program.

START offers a number of datasets related to terrorism. The most important of these is the Global Terrorism Database, a database of over 113,000 terrorist attacks from 1970 till 2015, excluding the year 1993 (as of July 2016). START also hosts the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, now known as the Terrorist Organization Profiles, but does not actively maintain or take responsibility for the data.

Social Media Use during Disasters is a research project that was conducted from July 2012 to October 2013, and it is one of the major contributions by the START research center to the risk communication field. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are used to collect and distribute information quickly and easily. Because of this function of social media, it is being used as a tool to communicate about disasters. “Given the growing importance of social media as a disaster communication tool, it is vital to understand how individuals use, behave, and interpret information on social media sites to better inform policy, guidance, and operations and to ensure that emergency managers, first responders, and policy makers can best optimize how they use these tools.”. A random sample of 2,015 U.S. residents participated in this study. The participants were asked to imagine that a disaster involving multiple terrorist attacks was unfolding. The participants were then presented with information from both local and national sources about the disaster through Facebook posts and tweets. Participants were then asked to complete a questionnaire assessing their responses to the information. The study found that the source of the information impacted its perceived credibility. However, the source alone did not influence participants’ likelihood of taking recommended action. The study also showed that after participants were exposed to the information they were more likely to communicate that information through interpersonal channels rather than through organizational media channels. Finally, the study also showed that demographics such as gender and age affected how participants responded to the information.

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