An Examination of the Repatriated Prisoners of War Data Bank
Published Date: December 1, 1998
We examine the Repatriated Prisoners of War Data Bank (RPWDB), which primarily includes information for 1978 through 1997 for repatriated prisoners of war (RPOWs). Our strategy is to explore the files and categorize them with respect to type of data, number of unique RPOWs in the files by year, data variable available for use, and summary details for number variables. We find that, of the 38 files on the RPWDB, 21 have data for Vietnam-era RPOWs. Of these, we find 13 files that are useful for research purposes and 8 that are either administrative tracking files or an extract of another file. Appendix A details the number of occurrences of each RPOW by file, while appendix B shows the same information for the control group. Appendices C through J contains the details of the relevant information for each of the 13 files holding data relevant to research use.
