Quote:
Originally Posted by GundamFan0083
The blog you are using is certainly interesting, however, it is far from the only source of information available. Though I do commend his attempt at objectivity, I'd like to know more about his political views in order to get a better idea of where he stands.
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Well since it is my blog you can draw whatever conclusions you like about my political opinions.
As for Gallup, I have come to trust them less and less, especially after their
poor performance in the 2012 election. (I have some
articles about that on my blog as well.) Gallup's sample for the November election skewed older and whiter than the actual electorate, and both of those are characteristics that correlate with gun ownership. Just today I was reading a
piece by John Sides that uses the YouGov surveys which report an ownership figure of 35%, much closer to the 33% that the 2010 General Social Survey reports. YouGov's polling was much pretty much
on target in the 2012 election. I've been thinking about writing a piece that compares different estimates of gun ownership rates. I would not be surprised to discover that Gallup is an outlier in the positive direction.
NORC conducts in-home interviews for the General Social Survey and draws its sample using multi-stage geographic methods that are the norm in academic survey research. I'd trust them over most telephone-based surveys any day. The GSS is seen as the "
gold standard" for measurement of gun ownership rates by most serious researchers in the field.
I also think that respondents are more willing to tell the truth than you seem to believe, especially when they have agreed to speak with an interviewer in the privacy of their own homes. Attacking the validity of sampling methods and respondent behaviors is a common reaction by people who do not like what the data tell them. I'm not saying you fall into this category, but it's not a very persuasive argument to someone like me with years of experience analyzing political and social survey data.