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16 J. Quantitative Criminology 1 (2000)

handle is hein.journals/jquantc16 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2000 Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment David McDowall,' Colin Loftin,' and Stanley Presser2 Estimates of the incidence of victim gun use from the National Crime Victimiz- ation Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than are those from other studies. To examine the divergence, we conducted a survey that gauged the impact of methodological differences between the NCVS and the other studies. For half of the sample, we asked questions from the NCVS, followed by questions from the other surveys. For the other half of the sample, we presented the questions in the reverse order. We examined two hypotheses: (1) survey methods account for the divergent results, and (2) the questions cover unrelated activities. The results provided some support for the first hypothesis, but respondents also reported many more defenses to the questions from the other surveys than to the NCVS questions. Consistent with the second hypothesis, this suggests that the NCVS and the other surveys measure responses to largely different provocations. KEY WORDS: defensive gun use; firearms; survey research; experimental designs; crossover designs. 1. INTRODUCTION The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) provides much lower estimates of the frequency of civilian defensive gun use than do other studies. Recent NCVS data yield an annual estimate of 116,000 cases of armed defense against criminals. The other surveys find as many as 4.7 million cases (Cook and Ludwig, 1998; Kleck and Gertz, 1995). This differ- ence has attracted a large amount of scholarly attention (e.g., Cook et al., 1997; Hemenway, 1997a, b; Kleck and Gertz, 1997; Smith, 1997), and it has both scientific and policy implications. For policy, an accurate count of gun defenses would be useful in com- paring the costs and benefits of widespread firearm ownership (Cook and Ludwig, 1998; Kleck, 1988). Firearm defenses may deter potential crimes 'Violence Research Group, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York 12222. 2Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742. 1 0748-4518/00/0600-0000$18.00/0 © 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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