National Lawful Use of Guns Survey (NLUGS), [United States], 2019 (ICPSR 37834)

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Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose

The purpose of this study is to better understand the opinions, beliefs, and practices of gun owners throughout the United States. In particular, to understand the types of guns commonly used by law-abiding gun owners and the benefits that gun ownership provides.

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All households are eligible for recruitment regardless of their phone status. Households without computers or internet access are provided with both during their participation in the survey.

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All panel participants were anonymous to the investigators and consent was given through a disclosure screen at the front of the internet-based survey. To enhance survey participation, a $10 incentive was offered to those who completed the baseline survey. A random sample of 3,698 internet panel members who reported owning a gun upon recruitment to Ipsos KnowledgePanel were sent an email inviting them to participate in the survey. Of these, 2,321 (62.8%) responded by clicking on the link to go the screener page, which contained a consent form explaining the study. Of the 2,321 who were screened, 2,086 (89.9%) completed the survey.

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Universe View help for Universe

All United States adults who personally own a gun.

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Response Rates View help for Response Rates

56.5%

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A scale developed by Lacombe et al. was adapted to measure gun owner social identity. The scale is based on 10 items ascertaining level of agreement with statements such as "I act like a typical gun owner" or "When I talk about gun owners, I usually say 'we' rather than 'they' (see Codebook for a list of all 10 items). In addition, the degree of respondents'agreement with the statement "Guns are important to my overall identity" was assessed directly.

A scale developed and validated by Mencken and Froese to assess the extent to which guns have a symbolic meaning to gun owners was adapted for use. This is an eight-item scale assessing the extent of agreement with the statements "Owning a gun makes me feel: (1) safe; (2) responsible; (3) confident; (4) patriotic; (5) in control of my fate; (6) more valuable to my family; (7) more valuable to my community; and (8) respected." The additional item: "The right to own guns is essential to my sense of freedom" was added.

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Original Release Date View help for Original Release Date

2022-09-14

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For selection of general population samples from KnowledgePanel, a patented methodology has been developed that ensures all samples behave as EPSEM samples. Briefly, this methodology starts by weighting the pool of active members to the geodemographic benchmarks secured from the latest March supplement of the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) along several dimensions. Using the resulting weights as measures of size, a probability-proportional-to-size (PPS) procedure is used to select study specific samples. It is the application of this PPS methodology with the imposed size measures that produces fully self-weighing samples from KnowledgePanel, for which each sample member can carry a design weight of unity. Moreover, in instances where a study design requires any form of oversampling of certain subgroups, such departures from an EPSEM design are accounted for by adjusting the design weights in reference to the CPS benchmarks for the population of interest.

The geodemographic benchmarks used to weight the active panel members for computation of size measures include:

• Gender (Male/Female)
• Age (18-29, 30-44, 45-59, and 60+)
• Race/Hispanic ethnicity (White/Non-Hispanic, Black/Non-Hispanic, Other/Non-Hispanic, 2+ Races/Non-Hispanic, Hispanic)
• Education (Less than High School, High School, Some College, Bachelor and beyond)
• Census Region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West)
• Household income (under 10k, $10K to $25k, $25K to $50k, $50K to $75k, $75K to $100k, $100K to $150k, and $150K+)
• Home ownership status (Own, Rent/Other)
• Metropolitan Area (Yes, No)Study-Specific Post-Stratification Weights

Once all survey data have been collected and processed, design weights are adjusted to account for any differential nonresponse that may have occurred. Depending on the specific target population for a given study, geodemographic distributions for the corresponding population are obtained from the CPS, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), or in certain instances from the weighted KnowledgePanel profile data. For this purpose an iterative proportional fitting (raking) procedure is used to produce the final weights. In the final step, calculated weights are examined to identify and, if necessary, trim outliers at the extreme upper and lower tails of the weight distribution. The resulting weights are then scaled to aggregate to the total sample size of all eligible respondents.

For this study, the following benchmark distributions of gun owners on the KnowledgePanel, weight all qualified respondents from KP to represent the ages 18+ KP Gun Owner Benchmarks on the following variables:

• Gender (Male, Female) by Age (18-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70+)
• Race-ethnicity (White/Non-Hispanic, Black/Non-Hispanic, Other/Non-Hispanic, Hispanic, 2+ Races/Non-Hispanic)
• Census Region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West) by Metropolitan Status (Metro, Non-Metro)
• Education (Less than High School, High School/Some College, Bachelor or higher)
• Household Income (under $25K, $25-$49,999, $50K-$74,999, $75K-$99,999, $100K-$149,999, $150K and over).

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