Personal vs. Household Measures of Gun Ownership: A Methodological and Theoretical Inquiry

• In Event: Making the Most of Survey Measures in Criminal Justice Research

Abstract

For more than half a century, the inquiry of who owns guns and why has been of great interest to criminologists, sociologists, and public health scholars. However, the question of how to best operationalize gun ownership in survey research has received scant theoretical and empirical attention, despite the extensive study of this phenomenon. In our research, we aim to fill this gap by conducting the first empirical assessment of the validity of household measures of gun ownership, along with a theoretical exposition of household gun owners. To accomplish our research objectives, we use data from the Harvard University's 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), a nationwide sample of 61,000 U.S. adults, to determine how non-owners in gun-owning households compare and contrast empirically with both gun owners and non-owners. We also use experimental data from a CES subsample to investigate whether the results of firearm research are partly dependent on whether personal or household measures of gun ownership are used. Our results shed new light on the complexities of measuring gun ownership and have important implications for future gun research. The specific findings and their implications will be discussed.

Authors

• Nathaniel Schutten, SUNY Albany

• Justin Pickett, SUNY Albany

• Kevin Wozniak, National University of Ireland Maynooth

• Elizabeth Brown, University of Massachusetts Boston