The title of my project is 鈥淕un Ownership Among Ukrainian Civilians: Changes in Prevalence Post-Invasion?鈥� This project was created as part of the Ukraine Public Security in Transition Project and was supervised by Dr. Aaron Erlich. My research goals were threefold. First, I aimed to determine if gun ownership among Ukrainian civilians has changed in recent years. Second, I wanted to assess the demographic and political predictors of gun ownership, hypothesizing that civilians in eastern and southern regions would be more likely to own guns. Lastly, I sought to determine whether Ukrainian citizens were sensitive to the social stigma surrounding gun ownership, and whether this stigma would pressure respondents to underreport their ownership. To these ends, I utilized a recent large-scale, two-wave survey of Ukrainians conducted for the Ukraine Public Security in Transition Project.
My interest in the ARIA project stemmed from my desire to gain first-hand research experience. In particular, I wanted experience in areas that align with my strong interest in both Eastern European politics and quantitative methods. Having studied under Prof. Erlich multiple times before, especially in upper-level quantitative methods classes, I felt well-prepared to take on this project.
My primary learning objective was to gain hands-on experience with quantitative political science research. The vast majority of my work was conducted in the R statistical programming language, which is widely used in the social sciences for data analysis. This experience deepened my practical experience with manipulating real-world data and interpreting its results 鈥� essential skills for a career in social science research.
One of the most rewarding aspects of this project was uncovering patterns in the data that sometimes challenged our hypotheses. For instance, I found that gun ownership rates had stayed constant across Ukraine between the summers of 2022-2023, which contradicts our expectations that general gun ownership would increase. I also found that one鈥檚 residence of origin often strongly correlated with gun ownership: being a resident of the Donetska and Kharkivska oblasts was particularly associated with gun ownership. This is consistent with my hypothesis that those in southern/eastern oblasts of Ukraine 鈥� i.e. regions that have seen the most direct conflict 鈥� will have higher rates of civilian gun ownership. In addition, I found that Ukrainian civilians were not sensitive to social desirability bias surrounding gun ownership: changing the framing the question to ask whether civilians owned a gun for self defense did not alter responses in a statistically significant way. This supported my hypothesis that Ukrainian civilians would be generally honest about whether they owned firearms.
Another highlight of this research will be the opportunity to present my findings to a broader academic audience this fall. This will both allow me to receive valuable feedback on my work and give experience communicating my findings to people who may not have prior knowledge of Ukrainian politics, or of the statistical methods used in this research.
One of the challenges I encountered during this research was the data manipulation and cleaning associated with using real-world survey data. While I had training in statistics and quantitative methods, I had relatively little experience working with real-world survey data. To overcome this, I frequently consulted with Prof. Erlich and graduate students working on similar projects in order to ensure that my models were appropriate and that my interpretations were accurate.
Participating in the ARIA project has significantly shaped my education and my future career path. It has solidified my interest in Eastern European politics and quantitative methods. It has also inspired me to continue honing my statistical analysis skills, possibly through a graduate program in statistics or a related field. I have gained hands-on experience with political science and applied statistics through my work on this project; these skills will be invaluable as I continue my education and pursue a career in research or policy analysis.
This award was funded in part by the Charles and Betty Maldoff Family Arts Research Internship Award. I give my special thanks to Mrs. Betty Maldoff, Mr. Eric Maldoff, Mr. Gerry Maldoff, and Mrs. Barbara Maldoff for their generous support of this research. I sincerely hope that this research is a valuable addition to the literature on Ukrainian security culture.
