Measuring civilian defensive firearm use: A methodological experiment

Estimates of the incidence of victim gun use from the National Crime Victim ization Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than are those From other stud ies. To examine the divergence, we conducted a survey that gauged the impac t of methodological differences between the NCVS and the other studies. For half of the sample, we asked questions from the NCVS, followed by question s from the other surveys. For the other half of the sample, we presented th e questions in the reverse order. We examined two hypotheses: (1) survey me thods account for the divergent results, and (2) the questions cover unrela ted 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 hypot hesis, this suggests that the NCVS and the other surveys measure responses to largely different provocations.