adult_5_2 with value 7 (Violence, suicide, homicide, abuse) returns "Undetermined"

[KlausBlass]

In the SmartVA-Analyze (Smart VA 2.2.0) app: For the variable adult_5_2 (kind of injury or accident) a value of 7 (Violence, suicide, homicide, abuse) always returns “Undetermined” as the cause of death. All other values (1,2,3,4,5,6,11) return the expected cause. (In Burkina Faso we currently have a lot of people killed by terrorists, whose cause of death is therefore not detected by SmartVA). My analysis:

1. through the Open Narrative I know exactly what happened, therefore can verify these cases (all are by firearm or stabbing).
2. I noticed that the WHOVA 2016 question Id10100 (adult_5_4) "...injury intentionally inflicted by someone else?" was usually not answered or even denied in our survey. When I set the answer to this question to 1 (=Yes), SmartVA correctly returns "Homicide" as the CoD in all 37 cases in our survey.

So, while one could argue that adult_5_2 should be answered with Yes in those cases, I would say Id10091 "... injured by a firearm" (followed by death) should be sufficient to select "Homicide".

[aflaxman]

Interesting! There are "business rules" for some injuries, including homicide, but when we implemented them, we thought in the case you face it would be a challenge to distinguish homicide (intentionally inflicted by someone else) from suicide. Although it would be straightforward to modify the business rules to remove the requirement that injury_by_other == True in the business rule, I like your approach of setting the value to Yes as a preprocessing step better, because I see some risk that in a different setting it might be better to do a different preprocessing.

This is also a great reminder to me that the Open Narrative contains valuable information that is not being used to its full extent by SmartVA!