Gun Control Poll/Fellowship of the Ring

Poll:

1.       Is there a firearm in your household?

(a)   Yes

(b)   No

(c)    I don’t know

2.       What should be the proper procedure for obtaining a firearm?

(a    A psychological evaluation

(b)   A gun safety class

(c)   All of the above

(d)   No formal procedure for obtaining a firearm

3.       What should Arizona law be pertaining to gun control?

(a)   Regulate access with a permit

(b)   No regulation

(c)   Ban firearms in public

(d)   Ban firearms entirely

4.       Some people believe that even if guns are prohibited, criminals will still obtain firearms.

(a)    Strongly agree

(b)    Agree

(c)    Disagree

(d)    Strongly Disagree

These graphs and the one below represent the apportionment of the total  responses. There are generally two popular and fairly evenly split answers (A and B for Question 1, etc.) and one or two less popular responses. In fact, not one person responded D to Question 4.   

Here are the results by grade level. Graph one demonstrates a cleavage between the upper and lower classmen (and women), with the majority of grades 9 and 10 answering B, or "No", to Question 1 while the majority of 11th and 12th graders responding A, or "Yes". A possible explanation for the fact that lower classmen do not have guns in their households while upper classmen do is simply that the 9th and 10th graders do not know and would not like to look ignorant by choosing C. Also interesting is the fact that both 9th and 12th graders chose option C for Question 2 while 10th and 11th graders chose option B. It seems students come full circle over the course of their four years.

The yellow and blue bar graphs represent the split between honors and non honors students. The data all follows a predictable pattern, with the majority of both honors and non honors students responding similarly in all graphs. The clear exception is Question One, in which more non honors students answered B for not having firearms in their households while more honors students responded A. Further, there is a slight switch on Question Three. Honors students clearly answered B (no regulation) more than C (ban firearms in public), whereas non honors students answered C slightly more than B. This is interesting since one would project that the more educated, and thus more liberal, honors students would prefer banning guns in public to having no regulation. Perhaps honors students' greater exposure to other  honors students lead them to trust the judgement of their peers more than non honors students who know first hand how  stupid people can be.

Randomness

To acheive randomness, the members of our group did many things. First we tried to avoid polling multiple members of one class. Also, we made a concerted effort to only poll students we saw outside of class. Another way we acheived randomness was that we did our best to not poll students we knew. This way we avoided only getting honors students or getting results that we knew we were going to receive. As for receiving an accurate sample, we made sure to poll an equal amount of males/femals and an equal amount of 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders.

Possible Sources of Error

One major source of error we did have was that most the students we ended up polling were honors students. This didnt necessarily distort our graph but it did not give us the sample size of both sides that we wanted. Also on question 4, we had no answers that were D and very few that were C. This could be due to the fact that the choices went from Strongly Agree to Agree. If it had been in a more random order more people may  have considered the option of disagree but since they saw two agree answers back to back they immediently wanted to answer agree. And last of all, one member of our group handed the answer sheet to the student being polled so they could write their responses. This could have influenced their responses.