Thanks you for that, Ed.

A phone survey of 1500 people...
And you think that means something?

You just shot a toe off, buddy.



The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted
January 9-13, 2013 among a national sample of 1,502 adults, 18 years of
age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia
(752 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 750 were
interviewed on a cell phone, including 369 who had no landline
telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data
Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates
International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit
dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling
International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish.
Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for
the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the
cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if
that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an
iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic
origin and nativity and region to parameters from the 2011 Census
Bureau's American Community Survey and population density to parameters
from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current
patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell
phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2012
National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also
accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell
phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined
sample and adjusts for household size among respondents with a landline
phone. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into
account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample
sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at
the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Group
Unweighted
sample size Plus or minus…
Total sample 1,502 2.9 percentage points
Form 1 727 4.2 percentage points
Form 2 775 4.1 percentage points
Men 725 4.2 percentage points
Women 777 4.1 percentage points
Republicans 403 5.7 percentage points
Democrats 473 5.2 percentage points
Independents 557 4.8 percentage points

Gun in household 529 5.0 percentage points

No gun in household 867 3.9 percentage points
Note that the individual gun policy questions on this survey (Q42) were
each asked only of about half of respondents (one form); as a result,
the margin of error for those questions is about double than for
questions asked of the entire sample. Sample sizes and sampling errors
for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question
wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce
error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

© Pew Research Center, 2013