Homeland Security Decisions - Assignment Example

The key concepts/constructs under study are the risk assessment and management framework which includes estimating the risks we face from terrorism and consequently making appropriate risk reduction investment to counter-terrorism. Another concept/construct is the value model for evaluating homeland security decisions that evaluate terrorism risks and assesses the effectiveness of actions to counter-terrorism. The author situates himself within the framework for other research in the field by making use of the literature reviews of previous researches, a survey, and experience with building value models to develop a homeland security value model so as to motivate the use of a value model for homeland security decision making while also illustrating its use to assess terrorism risks, assessing the benefits of countermeasures and developing a severity index for terrorism attacks.

The research design for the study is the meta-analysis design which is an analytical methodology that is designed to systematically evaluate and summarize the results of previous studies on the field and is not simply for summarizing existing knowledge, but also developing a new understanding of a research problem using synoptic reasoning. I believe the research design was appropriate for the study given that as opposed to the other models that are constructed with logic, judgment, and information, a value model focusses on value judgments instead of on facts and probabilities.

Consequently, the fact that a value model tries to answer the question of the relative desirability of the various possible consequences that may occur makes meta-analysis design.