Why do people hold different opinions on gun control?

Stage One: The Group Stage
The first stage is the group portion of the project in which you and three to four other students create questions to measure opinion on an issue or a related set of issues. Your group will also theorize about why opinion on these issues varies. Based on these discussions and what we’ve learned in class, you will come up with three hypotheses about the issue. (You can generate more hypotheses if you like, but three is a good goal). Keep in mind that you will need survey items that measure both the independent and the dependent variables you build your hypotheses around. How many questions your survey includes depends on what issue you are working on, but a good guideline is between 5-10 questions.
An example using the issue of guns:
1. Brainstorm with your group, asking the following: Why do people hold different opinions on gun control? How do we explain the variation of opinion in support for banning assault weapons (or background checks, etc.?) In other words, why do some people support banning assault weapons while others do not?
Example Theory: People who were socialized in times of mass school shootings are more likely to support gun control. Example rationale from lecture/book: Research on socialization shows that when people come of age politically can have long lasting effects on their political orientations.
Research Hypothesis: Younger age cohorts will be more supportive of assault weapons bans than older age cohorts.
2. Decide how you are going to measure your key variables of interest. How will you measure support for gun control, your dependent variable? There are many potential ways to measure it out there. Scour other polling organizations such as the Pew Research Center, Gallup, and the General Social Survey, just to name a few. How are you going to measure age? (There are several ways to ask these questions.) What are the specific questions you are going to ask on your survey? And what are the specific options you will offer respondents to the survey? (Note: It is okay, and often recommended, to ask questions about various aspects of an issue. You might ask about specific gun control policies or more general support for the Second Amendment or both. Explore surveys on these issues and see what items are promising for your study. It is acceptable and indeed common practice to use survey items from other reputable survey firms. But keep in mind you will ultimately need to make sure these are good questions (see below). How many questions you include on your survey is dependent on the issue your group is exploring. Again, a good guide is between 5-10 questions, though you can propose more.
How to look for potential question wording:
1. Search pollingreport.com for a clearinghouse of survey data.
2. Explore the American National Election Study. https://electionstudies.org/resources/anes-question-search/
(Note that this is a fairly sensitive search engine. When I typed in guns, I got a different set of results than when I typed in gun or gun control. So do be as general as you can or try different searches.)
3. Go to https://www.pewresearch.org/search/ and search in the box on the right hand side at the top.
4. Google the issue you are assigned and the word survey (google “climate change survey” or “climate change gallup” or “climate change yougov”, etc). Note: Gallup and yougov are large survey firms. Morning Consult and Yougov field many contemporary surveys, so you might want to look at them specifically for current issues like police brutality, protests, Black Lives Matter, etc. that may not have long survey histories on large academic surveys.
5. Go to google scholar (scholar.google.com) or jstor.org and search the issue you are interested in. These search engines return published scholarly work in these issue areas. Browse some of the articles that your search returns. See how the authors in those surveys measured the topics you are interested in.
• When finalizing questions, consider the information from the Asher book about good survey questions. For example, you will want to consider whether you should add a “don’t know” response, whether you should have a neutral option, and whether you need to be sensitive to social desirability effects. Check your questions carefully. I will be looking to see that your survey displays a strategic sequence of questions, employs simple/straightforward question wording, uses balanced arguments, avoids ambiguous language, avoids double-barreled/multiple stimuli questions, avoids double-negatives, avoids biased/manipulative information, and accurately measures key concepts that match the proposed hypotheses. Here’s a good summary that may help, too: https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/u-s-survey-research/questionnaire-design/#pretests
Tips: When you are developing your hypotheses, you should think in terms of demographics (age, race, gender*, income, region of the country, rural/urban, religious affiliation, religiosity, economic class) and general orientations that might affect support or opposition to the issues you are studying (party identification, ideological self-identification, worldview, personality, racial resentment, egalitarianism, modern sexism, etc.) We have already studied many of these, and you can find how authors have measured these by reviewing the readings or lectures or by searching google scholar. For example, we are studying the concept of racial resentment, and our book provides the specific question wording for this battery. There are also batteries we have discussed like the TIPI which measures personality; we know about measures of disgust, etc. (*Note that surveys have traditionally measured gender as a binary construction, though that is changing in more recent surveys. I suggest you look into this.)

Putting it all together: your group needs to turn in the following: 1) a word document (or pdf) that is formatted exactly as if you were going to send out a survey to a group of people. That is, you must include the exact question wording and response options. Think about the question order as well. 2) a summary of the (at least) three hypotheses you formulated and a brief rationale for your thinking behind each. 3) a discussion of the process by which you selected your questions, including any concerns or alternative questions you considered but discarded and why. 4) the biggest challenges you all faced in completing the process, and5) a link to the Qualtrics survey you have created. Note: You might consider assigning one of these sections to each group member.
Stage II: Putting our class survey together
your group will present your survey items and hypotheses to the class in a short (approximately five minute) presentation. The rest of the class will provide constructive feedback about the hypotheses and questions. I will then take the class feedback and my own and together we will make any edits. Once we sign off on the survey, on November 4th we will devote class time to learning how to program it in Qualtrics you should have the link turned in and approved by me. You will then send it to as many people as you can. It would be ideal if your group solicited approximately 150 responses or more. Once you have finished your collection period, we will work on downloading the data into a Stata file and getting it ready for your analysis. Ideally this would be done by November 9th.
Stage III: Your individual data analysis assignment
Finally, you will write an individual analysis of the survey data in which you provide information about your main variable of interest and evidence for/against your hypothesis. You only need to choose one to explore. In all, this analysis will probably run you about 7-8 pages double-spaced not including works cited. This part of the paper but I will accept papers until the last class day without penalty. This should give you two to three weeks to complete the data analysis portion.
Suggested Components of Paper
• Introduction — This brief section sets up your issue area and broad research questions. (“In this paper, I will examine the public’s attitudes towards gun control. I will explore the role of xx in explaining how much an individual supports banning assault weapons.”)
• Hypotheses State the hypotheses (in words) that your study is going to test. Think about homework 3 here. What is the rationale/theory behind this hypotheses? In other words, what have we learned (or what have you read) that leads you to formulate this hypothesis? (See above for my example about gun control and age). You do not need to test all three of your group’s hypotheses. Instead, focus on testing one of them. (If you want to test more, that’s fine but it’s not mandatory.)
• Data and Methods of Describe how we got the sample, report the total number of people included in the sample, and identify any potential biases our survey collection method has introduced. In a table, provide summary statistics (mean, median, or mode and, when appropriate, standard deviation or interquartile range) that describe what our sample looks like in terms of such things as age, race, education level, partisanship, ideology, gender, and region. How representative is our sample compared to the U.S.? Note that for these you will need to use the commands we learned in homework 1 to summarize these variables. You should also provide a measure of the central tendency and dispersion of the dependent variable as well as tell me how you measured it and any relevant independent variables.
• Hypothesis testing Find the sample statistics, run the appropriate test, and draw your conclusion. For example, let’s say you are looking at whether men and women’s support for an assault weapons ban differs in the sample. Report the sample statistics that tell us how supportive women are of the ban and how supportive men are. Then, think about the level of measurement of your independent and dependent variables and run the appropriate statistical test (see homework 3) to see if this difference holds in the population. In doing so, explain what your p-value tells you. In general, did you find support for your hypothesis or not?
• Conclusion This is where you summarize what you learned from the project . You might include something about the most interesting thing that you learned from the project. You could discuss anything that you found surprising or any ways you might improve the questionnaire or sample method.
If you have questions or concerns about writing an academic paper for Political Science, check out these links:
• http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/political-science/• http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/poli-sci.original.pdf