Predictors of College Students’ Concern about Campus Gun Violence: A Comparison of Men and Women

ABSTRACT

The current study addressed whether and why college students express concern about on-campus gun violence, based on comparisons of multivariate logistic regression models of college men and women. Data collected by the ACHA-NCHA III during the spring of 2020 from 8,950 undergraduate students at 13 four-year U.S. colleges and universities were analyzed. Results indicated that concern about on-campus gun violence differed significantly for men and women, and that indicators of potential exposure to campus gun violence, physical vulnerability, perceptions of safety, prior interpersonal violent victimization, and social integration all exhibited gendered effects. Research implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Gun violence
• concealed carry
• campus safety
• college students
• concern about gun violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclaimer

Data for this study were collected and provided by the American College Health Association (ACHA). The opinions, findings, and conclusions presented/reported in this article are those of the author(s) and are in no way meant to represent the corporate opinions, views, or policies of the American College Health Association (ACHA). ACHA does not warrant nor assume any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented in this article.

Notes

1. See, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (2021) for discussion of federal and state regulations on the sale/delivery of handguns and long guns to persons ages 21 and under.

2. Our use of the term “gender” is not intended to capture the entire spectrum of possible gender identities (e.g., man, woman, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, or genderqueer) as this was beyond the scope of the present study. We use the term “gender” to refer to college students who self-identified as either “man” or “woman.”

3. At present, an “attitude” refers to one’s evaluative dispositions and judgments about something, such as an issue like guns on campus, and that attitudes have cognitive components consisting of beliefs or knowledge, affective components involving emotions or feelings (e.g., concern), and behavioral components, such as a predisposition on whether and how to act (Marcinkowski & Reid, 2019, p. 461).

4. The distribution of the ordinal five category Likert measure was unevenly distributed across the five categories, with only 3% (n = 272) reporting being extremely concerned and 6% (n = 537) reporting being very concerned. These percentages and the number of cases were even smaller within gender identity (for men, n = 49 and n = 436; for women, n = 223 and n = 101, for the respective categories of concern about gun violence on campus). The small number of cases in the categories is a plausible reason for why the Brant tests were statistically significant for the test of parallel lines regression assumption. The remaining three categories were much larger than the extremely and very concerned categories, as follows: moderately concerned 18% (n = 1,611); slightly concerned 36.4% (n = 3,259); not at all concerned 36.5% (n = 3,271).

5. Due to the response choice “mark all the responses that apply,” the sum of the number of cases for each identity category (n = 2,838) does not equal the total respondents in the “other only” category.

6. These two analyses were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics, version 27.

7. ACHA categorized participating schools’ enrollments as “large,” “medium,” or “small.”

8. To test the effect of gender identity (woman = 0 and man = 1) on concern for gun violence on campus, we estimated a logistic regression with gender identity as a predictor along with all the other predictors listed in Table 1. The results showed that being a man significantly lowered the probability of being concerned about gun violence (b = – .782, p < .001).

9. In the data analysis stage, we estimated three ordered logistic regression models, one model for the entire sample, one model for men, and one model for women. For each of the three models, the overall model results indicated that the Brant test of parallel regression assumption (a.k.a. the parallel lines assumption) was statistically significant (p < .001), which provided evidence that the parallel regression assumption had been violated. Hence, we rejected the null hypothesis that the slopes were equal across values of concern about gun violence on campus. Further testing using a detailed Brant test for each individual independent variable in the respective women and men models showed that those variables which violated the parallel regression assumption were not the same across gender identity, and hence a generalized ordered logistic regression model which relaxes this assumption by constraining the slopes across the categories of the outcome variables to be same for those variables that were not statistically significant using the Brant test also was not an appropriate estimation technique (e.g., Williams & Quiroz, 2019). These results collectively led to the conclusion to fit a less restrictive model, such as a multivariate logit model.