Chapter 5 gives an extended empirical example of the Benford agreement procedure for assessing the validity of social science data. The example uses country-level data collected and estimated by the Sea Around Us organization on the dollar values of reported and unreported fish landings from 2010 to 2016. We report Benford agreement analyses for the Sea Around Us data (1) by reporting status, (2) by decade, (3) for a large fishing region of 22 West African countries, and (4) foreach of the 22 individual countries in West Africa.

Chapter 6 provides a second empirical example of the Benford agreement procedure: here we analyze new daily COVID-19 cases at the US state level and at the global level across nations. Both the state-level and the global analyses consider time as a variable. Specifically we examine, (1) for the United States, new reports of COVID-19 between January 22, 2020 and November 16, 2021 at the state level, and (2) for the cross-national data, new reports of COVID-19 between February 24, 2020 and January 13, 2022. At the state level, we report Benford agreement analyses for (1) the full dataset, (2) cases grouped alphabetically, (3) cases grouped regionally, (4) cases grouped by days of the week, and (5) cases grouped by their governor’s party (Republican or Democratic). We then turn our Benford agreement analysis to global cross-national COVID-19 data to assess whether Benford agreement of COVID-19 varies across countries.