1/2022-5/2022
2020 Cooperative Election Study Common Content - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910/DVN/E9N6PH
What are the contributing factors that affect US voters' opinion on increased gun control legislation?
The main research question our group wants to answer is whether or not proximity to a city is a contributing factor specifically that correlates with support for increased gun control legislation. This would be valuable for policy discussions if we knew more about why some people oppose gun control. Gun control has been a huge topic of discussion in this day in age on whether or not assault rifles are too readily available to the public.
Throughout our research, we closely looked at a few hypotheses to attempt to determine what different attributes of a voter might be a big factor in whether or not they support gun control legislation. The hypothesis we focused on the most was whether or not what type of area the voter lives in affects their support of gun control legislation, and after closely examining our visuals and results, we found that this hypothesis was indeed proved right. We found that the proximity to a city is a contributing factor that correlates with support for increased gun control legislation and that people who live in or closer to the city are more likely to support gun control legislation, however, there is no significant relationship between one’s proximity to a major city and the level of support they have for increased gun control legislation across the United States. Our analysis also acknowledged that the urban zones in which a respondent lives are not a statistically significant indicator of their support for gun control legislation.