"Guns on Campus: The Impact of Campus Carry on Student Behavior and Emotions" (by Inara Ramazanova, Terressa Benz, and Joseph DeAngelis): Review 1

Vote: publish pending minor changes

The manuscript “Guns on Campus: The Impact of Campus Carry on Student Behavior and Emotions” helps address a gap in the campus carry literature by providing first-person qualitative accounts of students’ reports of their behaviors and perceptions on a campus that allows campus carry. The authors situate this study within the relevant existing literature on campus carry and make meaningful recommendations for future research.

Some revisions that I would suggest.

1. Expand on the methods section to include:

a. clarification of who led the focus groups and if there were other people (note-takers, assistants, etc.) in the focus group.

b. a discussion of how inter-rater reliability was checked.

c. clarification if the analysis was deductive (“coded according to key concepts identified in the existing literature”), or inductive (“based on emergent themes”); or if it was both, discuss the results of the initial conceptual analysis and clarify what the emergent theme analysis added beyond the framework of the key concepts (Gibbs, 2017).

d. an appendix that includes the guided questions used in the focus groups.

2. Throughout much of the paper, the discussion is framed as changes to behaviors and perceptions, and this is appropriate for students who attended the university before the law change three years earlier. Still, I’m unsure if this language captures experiences for students who may not have been on campus before the law changed. Adjusting the wording where appropriate would address this concern.

3. Change in student behavior is identified as a theme, but the subtheme of carrying a gun was not included. At least one of the quotes presented in the Change in Student Behavior seems to indicate that some students started to carry a gun on campus. Including a discussion of carrying behavior might add to this theme.

4. Most quotes are identified by Group # and Student #, but some are identified as “another participant” or by Interviewee #. Standardizing this would be helpful. Additionally, there seems to be heavy reliance on student #1 from focus group #1 in the quotes, and selecting more quotes from other respondents may result in more representative coverage of the focus group participants.

5. Information about the state requirements for campus carry regarding training and mental health would help contextualize the analysis in the Student Concerns section.