Publications
The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research has funded 51 research projects, including 13 dissertation and seven postdoctoral awards. Research topics include suicide, violent crime, school violence, police shootings, firearm safety, defensive gun use and non-lethal firearm injuries. The findings from those projects are listed here once publicly available.
Explore published findings from research projects funded by the collaborative.
No publications match the filter selections.
This study considers self-harm repetition risk factors by using an incident user design to examine case fatality at index self-harm events and each repeat event by method, describes method-switching, and identifies factors associated with repetition of self-harm.
View research (subscription required)In order for social scientists to use social media as a source for understanding human behavior and public opinion, they need to understand the demographic characteristics of the population participating in the conversation. What proportion are female? What proportion are young? While previous literature has investigated this problem, this work presents a larger scale study that investigates inference techniques for predicting age and gender using Twitter data.
View researchThis paper discusses machine learning fairness when data contains biases in the form of selection bias and/or missing values exist.
View researchUnderstanding the social contexts of violent crime remains controversial in the literature. This study examines common social contexts in four cities (Houston, TX, Baltimore, MD, Jackson, MS, Wilmington, DE). Data were examined in two studies. In the first, each city was compared to national county-level data on health outcomes. In the second, communities within the four cities were examined for correlates of crime.
View research (subscription required)This paper presents a spatiotemporal model that predicts firearm prevalence at the resolutions of one state and one month from the numbers of background checks and suicides committed with a firearm. Drawing on principles from econometrics, the model also accounts for interactions between states. The model’s output is challenged in causal analysis, which uncovers unprecedented associations between firearm prevalence, media output on firearm regulations, and mass shootings.
View researchIn this cross-sectional study of 1227 patients, coding accuracy of firearm injury incidents at 3 level I US trauma centers was assessed using case-level data for 2008 to 2019. The results showed that 28% of all emergency department visits for assault-related firearm injuries were miscoded as firearm accidents in hospital discharge data.
View researchFirearms are used in about half of U.S. suicides. This study investigated how various medical diagnoses are associated with firearm and nonfirearm suicide.
View researchThis study aims to assess how much, if at all, firearm storage practices changed as a result of Child Access Prevention Negligent Storage (CAP-NS) laws.
View research [PDF]In this cross-sectional study using a total of 2684 cases of firearm injury, a natural language processing model was developed using free-text notes in the electronic health record to assign intent to firearm injury incidents in patients presenting to emergency departments.
View researchThe PHDCN+ is a continuation of a multi-cohort interdisciplinary longitudinal study that began in the mid-1990s that was designed to unite the longitudinal study of individual lives with social context, especially neighborhoods, families, peers, schools, and the criminal justice system.
View researchThis paper models county-level changes in firearm mortality rates (total, homicide, and suicide) from 1989 to 1993 vs 2015 to 2019 and identifies and characterizes hot spots showing unexpected changes over time.
View researchIntimate partner violence (IPV) victims and perpetrators often report suicidal ideation, yet there is no comprehensive national dataset that allows for an assessment of the connection between IPV and suicide. The authors developed and validated a tool that detects mentions of IPV circumstances (yes/no) for single suicides in NVDRS death narratives.
View researchExtreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as red flag laws, are a potential tool to prevent firearm violence, including mass shootings, but little is currently known about the extent of their use in cases of mass shooting threats or about the threats themselves. This study collected and abstracted information from ERPO cases from six states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, and Washington).
View research [subscription required]Since many policies impacting firearm use and ownership are initiated at the state level, it is important to understand state-specific prevalence of firearm access and firearm storage practices and their intersection with mental health risk factors for suicide. This understanding can inform clinical, public health, and policy efforts to prevent firearm suicides among California’s veteran population.
View research [PDF]This paper estimates the proportion of adults in gun-owning households who have discussed firearm safety with a clinician and characterizes the content of these discussions.
View researchHas implementation of the gun violence restraining order law, beginning in 2016, been associated with a reduction in firearm assault or firearm self-harm in San Diego County, California?
View researchThis study estimated the association between living with a lawful handgun owner and risk for homicide victimization. This retrospective cohort study followed 17.6 million adult residents of California for up to 12 years.
View researchThis study aimed to identify U.S. states that showed unexpected decreases and increases in firearm homicide rates and summarise their firearm policy changes in the last three decades.
View researchThis study aimed to identify suicide rates by occupation category in Utah and describe the hospital history and circumstances of suicide decedents in the occupation category that had the state's highest rate and highest number of suicides: Construction and Extraction.
View research (subscription required)Increasing suicide rates across the United States are disproportionate among populations most impacted by mass incarceration. This study aimed to determine if incarceration is associated with risk of suicide and firearm suicide after release from prison.
View research
Did the likelihood of being shot, seeing someone shot, or living near firearm violence vary by race, sex, and birth cohort over the life course during the past three decades?
View researchA case study in bringing diverse stakeholders, particularly gun owners, together to find common ground on firearm suicide prevention and in using linked data to support their efforts.
View research (subscription required)The purpose of this study is to describe the creation, implementation, activities and rationale for the Area Technology Centers (ATCs), an innovation adopted by the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD’s) Bureau of Detectives (BoD) in 2019 for the purpose of supporting investigations of crimes of serious violence by deploying specialized teams of officers to gather and process video and digital evidence.
View research (subscription required)This paper uses parent-adolescent dyads to describe the relationship between adolescent access to household firearms and parental storage practices and the discordance between what parents think about their child’s access and the child’s self-reported access.
View researchThis paper discusses risk perceptions and storage practices.
View researchThis is the first paper to describe and compare Black vs White household gun ownership patterns.
View researchThis paper introduces Legal Firearm Prevalence (LFP), a direct behavioral measure based on the population of firearm licensees in Massachusetts. LFP is not directly measurable in most firearm markets, so this research tests candidate proxies for LFP in several common research designs, finding that firearm acquisitions are the best proxy in every research design tested.
View researchThis dissertation explores underutilized data sources and novel theories to conceptualize and operationalize structural racism.
View researchThis paper considers challenges associated with using social media data and the ethical considerations these challenges create, framing the ethical dilemmas within the context of data privacy and algorithmic bias (fairness).
View research [PDF]For social media related machine learning tasks, having reliable data labelers is important. However, it is unclear whether students or Mechanical Turk workers would be better data labelers on these noisy, short posts. This paper compares the reliability of students and Mechanical Turk workers for a series of social media data labeling tasks.
View research on OSFDoes the risk of suicide change for women when someone they live with in a previously handgun-free household lawfully acquires a handgun?
View researchThis study describes the alignment of medical diagnoses with life circumstances by identifying suicide typologies among decedents. Demographics, stressful life events, suicidal behavior, perceived and diagnosed health problems, and suicide method contributed to the typologies.
View researchLarge-scale organic data generated from newspapers, social media, television, and radio require an expertise in infrastructure management, data collection, and data processing in order to gain research value from them. This paper describes development of text analytic research portals to help social science researchers who do not have the resources necessary to collect, store, and process these large-scale data sets.
View research (subscription required)This study examined the extent to which engagement with firearm means safety messaging is conditional based on type of messaging, political beliefs, past suicidal ideation, and implicit associations of firearms with safety or danger.
View research [PDF]The study describes the three year hospital visit histories of suicide decedents in Utah grouped by the suicide method they used.
View research (subscription required)This dissertation examines how firearm availability impacts the risk of firearm violence, and evaluates community-level interventions through zoning regulations on firearm dealers and individual-level intervention via targeted prohibitions among those at high risk of harming others or themselves.
View research on OSFThis study sought to quantify the separate and joint relations of community firearm and alcohol availability with individual-level risk of (fatal and nonfatal) firearm self-harm.
View researchThis paper demonstrates that multiple imputation by super learning (MISL) can be used to assess intent-specific nonfatal firearm injuries in the CDC's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). Intent distributions derived using MISL differ from those derived under the assumption data are missing completely at random.
View research (subscription required) View research on OSFProtest movements linked to racial inequality in policing and antigovernment sentiment have roiled the United States in recent years. In this visualization, the authors examine how race, support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), and gun ownership predict views about the political uprising of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
View researchThis paper examines National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) data from 2015–2017 for five US states that supplied information on gun owner in firearm suicides.
View research
