[On Sep 18 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
Some more information about DGU surveying from a Kleck email:
"We got 4,977 completions over 3 months, using an average of about 10 callers per day (and I believe all of them were FSU students)"
Also, look at the acknowledgments of Kleck and Gertz's paper:
"The authors wish to thank David Bordua, Gary Mauser, Seymour Sudman, and James Wright for their help in designing the survey instrument. The authors also wish to thank the highly skilled staff responsible for the interviewing: Michael Trapp (Supervisor), David Antonacci, James Belcher, Robert Bunting, Melissa Cross, Sandy Hawker, Dana R. Jones, Harvey Langford, Jr., Susannah R. Maher, Nia Mastin-Walker, Brian Murray, Miranda Ross, Dale Sellers, Esty Zervigon, and for sampling work, Sandy Grguric."
If there had been a huge fire or something and all of the computer and paper records of Kleck's survey had been destroyed, we would still have twenty witnesses who could confirm that the survey had been conducted.
Lott says his survey interviewed 2,424 people, over three months, so he would have needed 5 callers operating a day. That would have required a pool of at least eight interviewers, plus a supervisor. I looked through Lott's vita and I couldn't see any paper where it looked like he had conducted a phone survey, so he would have had to consult with an expert on the design of phone surveys. And....
Put yourself in Lott's shoes. It's the beginning of 1997. You're busy writing your book and talking to reporters and whatnot about your 1996 paper. You decide to do a survey in order "to see for myself whether the estimates put together by other researchers (such as Gary Kleck) were accurate". Who are you going to call to discuss the survey design?
Yeah, that's right. Gary Kleck.
But Lott didn't. We know this because both Duncan and I have asked Kleck about it.
[I have sent a copy of this message to Lott, just as I have the others on this topic.]
Still nothing from Lott.
For whatever it's worth, I am the David Antonacci mentioned here as one of the FSU students who participated in Lott's controversial 1997 survey--which I just learned today is/was in such dispute.The survey was in fact conducted more-or-less as Lott describes. One minor point--we did not call from our dorm rooms, but from an office where an automated telemarketing-type dialing system was set up for the purpose of the survey.I can't verify whether or not all aspects of the survey were conducted properly, but the calls and phone interviews did take place--and the results I see reported by Lott do seem to reflect the results we were getting.
David Antonacci did not work on the Lott survey, but on Kleck's 1993 survey. He confirmed that he had mixed up the surveys in an email.