Doing local gun survey

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.cheese.

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I'm trying to put together a survey to cover a large middle-class to upper-class neighborhood as simply as possibly.

The questions I'm trying to ultimately answer per house are:

1. Is there a gun/firearm within your home?
2. Is there more than one gun/firearm within your residence?
3. Is the gun/firearm primarily owned for home protection?
4. Is the gun/firearm primarily owned for sport usage?
5. Within your residence is there any weapon that is categorized as semi-automatic?
6. Within your residence is there any weapon that would be considered an "Assault Weapon" under H.R. 1022, or was considered an "Assault Weapon" in the past.
7. Do you feel that the right of Americans to bear arms should not be infringed?


Those are the questions. I have a site set up on Google Pagemaker for me to use, but I need to figure out what free service I can use to embed the survey/poll questions.

I also want there to be an access code/password to access the poll questions, because I plan to go door to door dropping off flyers for the whole neighborhood (something like 500 houses) and I only want them replying.... not somebody who finds the page through Google.

Any help is apppreciated.
 
I think you are going to have a really hard time trying to get answers out of people on such a sensitive topic. I sure as hell would not give information like this to a stranger.
 
no no... I'm designing this so that it is anonymous.

In other words, I drop off the flyers at every house - with the link to an online page to go to with the questions. The password is the same password everybody else has, just to make sure that the questions aren't answered by people who are not being surveyed.

All they do is online, submit their answers anonymously, and that's it.

No names, no specific addresses, I don't need to know who said what... just the total numbers for the whole neighborhood.

I'm just looking to get aggregate numbers.

If anybody has any other ideas as to how I can make this more anonymous so people aren't weary about replying - let me know.

Maybe put it on an https connection?
 
I would not respond, even to a "secure" website. Not so worried about other people grabbing it, but who is the guy running the site and why should I trust him? Why does he want to know what valuable things I own? What is he going to pester me with if I respond? Is he a thief? Is he a politician trying to figure out how to more effectively take my guns away? Is this worth the hassle to me?

... That's the thought pattern that would be in my head as I tossed the flyer into the trash.

pax
 
You could suggest to them that they could use the local library's computer to input their answers. That way, you could not trace their IP address to their homes or workplaces. Just make sure you mention that you want HONEST answers from the persons you delivered the flyer to, and DO NOT pass it on to a friend.

Also, you could put in a question such as "Do you feel threatened by criminal activity in your everyday life?" Kind of get them thinking about WHY you are asking the questions.
 
You could suggest to them that they could use the local library's computer to input their answers.
Click to expand...

The very few people that look at the survey,( and do not immediately put it in the trash), will be immediately turned off by the idea of going to the library to complete the survey. People are too busy to be bothered by something that helps them in no way, and can possibly be detrimental.
 
Too much trouble to go online and fill out a survey. Maybe it's a criminal, wanting to know which house is best to loot...
Most people trash surveys anyhow - even the ones you can send back in a prepaid envelope.
 
If you are serious about getting useful data, you need to look more closely into survey methods and social research in general. You might check your school library for "The Practice of Social Research" and "Survey Research Methods" by Earl Babbie or "Improving Survey Questions: Design and Evaluation" and "Survey Research Methods" by Floyd J. Flower, Jr. These books are often used in behavorial science courses and easily found at the course reserve for most school.

If those are the actual questions you are writing, you should rewrite them.

The phrasing of the questions and the use of jargon (who the hell knows what 1022 is other than gun people?) will probably result in a self-selecting sample. Those who are indifferent will have no motivation to fill out the survey, those who do care may be leery to reveal such information. You'd be amazed how many people distrust any sort of anonymous survey. The questions also reveal a pretty strong bias.

I would guess you'd be extremely lucky to get even a 5% response rate with flyers. With a population of only 500, your sample size would be too small for any sort of worthwhile statistical analysis. For example, if you wanted to be able to say that you are 95% sure that between 27% and 39% answered yes to question 2, for example, you would need 217 responses.

Survey research is very tricky and commonly takes quite a bit of fine tuning to provide the kind of data that is useful for analysis.
 
I have an answer about the survey itself. For the answers, don't always have it yes or no. It is nice to have a middle ground.

Is there a gun/firearm in your home. yes or no easy but......

Is the gun used primarily for home protection? I don't like how this question limits the response. Me only having 3 guns right now, each gun has a multi use. I use my carry gun for competition also.

so some sort of multiple choice. yes-no-gun is multiuse-other

Something to that effect.
 
I've had some classes in surveys and polls. There are several problems with your plan and your survey.

The first problem is your plan. As other posters mentioned, a 5% return rate on this type of survey would be normal. With the questions you've asked, your likely to get only about a 1% return rate, if that. As Pax said, many reactions are going to be, "Who the heck are you and why do you want to know?" followed by tossing this in the trash.

Your questions also need work. Questions #5 and #6 assume the respondent has knowledge that is not included in the survey itself. That's a no-no for several reasons. The standard is to provide all the information needed to answer the survey in the survey itself. Your responses are going to be contaminated because you aren't going to know how many people really know what a semi-automatic firearm is and what HR 1022 is.

Question #7 is useless from any scientific survey point of view. It demands a "preloaded" answer and makes the bias of the person doing the survey obvious.

Why do you want this info? What are you planning to do with it once you obtain the info? If you want the survey, and the results, to be taken seriously, it needs to be done in a much more profesional manner following the current standards for methodology.

My reccomendation is to take a college level course in how to conduct polls or surveys. Another possibility is to hire a professional polling firm to conduct the survey for you. There are plenty of opinion pollers out there.
 
Like others have said you would be lucky to get even 25 responses; most people will round file the flyers. Add the sensitive topic ("do you own an eeeeevil assault rifle? if yes, why?") and even the people who might take the time to do the survey will toss it out it like a fresh warm present on the carpet from the pooch. Especially if it was stuck to their front door. I know I would. Since in the best case scenario your results aren't even a large number per the central limit theorem and before adding in the multi-dimensional nature of your data set, your results will not be statistically significant. You'll have to do extreme hypothesis testing and let alpha == 0, but that's only done as a joke by stats students who are out of time on an exam. Anyhoo I hope you find some way of getting it done, but I think it'll be very difficult, and very expensive.
 
As for why not put an option other than yes/no - I don't want the data to fall victim to the central-tendency theorem.

I'll look into the other recommendations.
 
I recently watched an episode of Scrubs where the boss gave the female doctor an anonymous survey to fill out to evaluate him. She figured everyone was getting one, and ripped him a new one. When she asked her co-workers if they had done the same, they replied that they had not received a survey.

It was indeed anonymous, but she was the only one to get one...


CLIFFS: I would not fill it out.
 
Just popping in to echo the general impression - no way in heck I'd answer those questions to a stranger. Since I'm presuming you don't have access to 4473 data, The only way I can think of to maybe get some vague idea is to post flyers for an RKBA-related meeting, and see who shows up. I still wouldn't trust even those numbers though.

If the idea is to get a better idea of what percentage of the people are armed with "evil" guns, I think you'd be better off investigating the supply side - contacting manufacturers, importers, distributors, and so forth, and try and get a rough estimation of how many of which models are sold, then comparing that to the population at large.

-K
 
i think you guys are way too paranoid about stuff. i wouldn't answer the questions because i'm lazy, not because i'm concerned about someone knowing i have a gun.

there are lots more valuable things in my house than guns that are worth stealing. i think a criminal can reasonably assume that if you live in a nice house, there's stuff worth stealing in it. so i don't think knowledge of the presence of guns in any way would make criminals MORE Likely to target my house.

further, i think it's hypocritical. many people on this board vehemently (in a slobbering fury, even) argue that the 1% possibility of a CCW holder in a public place is a significant deterrent to criminals... and at the same time are concerned that a criminal know there's a 100% possibility you have a gun. it makes no sense to me. I keep $20k-30k of guns in my house, incl machine guns and i don't care if the whole world knows. I'm proud to be a gun owner. I think that makes me LESS likely to be a target.

And as for the govt, they already know what you have. The idea that the gov't is going to take some cornball survey and hack the website to find your IP address, and then match those up with your ISP's DHCP records to find out that you "have a gun that would be considered an AW" is just ludicrous.


to theeconomist: it was obvious to me that the list was what you were tryign to answer, and not the actual questions you intended to put on the survey. i guess my advice would be to be honest with the surveyees about what you really intend to do with the info. is this a project for a college class? is it because you have some political ax to grind? who is sponsoring it? is it by someone in your community for your community and you plan to distribute the results only to people in your community? are you going to send the data off to the NRA or brady's or the local news station? i'm guessing you're just trying to get your neighbors to realize how many of them are gun owners, but who knows?

i wouldn't put a lot of effort into securing a website. my recommendation would be to do a reverse lookup of telephone numbers by street address, and call each of the neighbors. or, better yet, attend the next homeowners association meeting and present the idea of a survey to them. you'll know right away whether it will be well received or get people all hot and bothered. ask them for suggestions about how they'd rather respond and you'll get better turnout
 
Sorry to disappoint but,

I'd take a flier like that if it came my way and be tempted to wipe my --- with it. But more than likely being a poor choice of paper with which to do that, I'd toss it in the trash.
 
If I was an anti-gun person, I would lie and give answers to inflate the figures.

Since I am about as pro- as you can get, but not long on trust, I would answer "Guns???? Who, me??"
 
It is kind of like answering the question: Have you stopped beating your wife?

No one will reply to a questionaire like becuase it "could" be used for reasons they do not approve of. Just the thought rings out "national registry"

A flyer like that would be fire starter at my house along with the rest of the junk mail.
 
Good technical answers as to the problems. As I mentioned in another post, there is a large literature on gun issues and the problems of sampling are discussed. For example, Kleck's usage and DGU figures have been challenged in a way that points out the problem. However, my mind is blanking on Kleck's protagonist - it's at work.

But as I said elsewhere, go to the library and get the reference librarian to help you search on all the previous work on gun ownership surveys. Search on citations of Kleck. There is just a new recent survey out on ownership issues - just type 'gun' into PsychInfo for example - or the other data bases.

How many folks in 500 in a neighborhood ever heard of HR 1022?

I'm afraid, you have a gun zealot's cause and that taints the questions. If you want to present a progun piece to some prof - a bad job will get you vaporized and deservedly so.
 
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