The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 3 - 117

No Smoking Guns Here

on their own time. five respondents from five
different public institutions agreed to participate in the study. four participated in a phone
interview and one submitted written responses, emailing them back to the researchers.
study participant demographics represented
various racial and gender identities. however,
to protect the anonymity of participants, we do
not specifically provide social identity markers
and additional institutional information.

Sensemaking as an organizing
principle serves a "central role
in the determination of human
behavior" and interplays with
how an individual makes sense
of a situation and influences
a person's actions .

Data Collection
interview transcripts served as the primary data
for this study. additionally, we supplemented
the interviews with institutional documents
discussing campus-concealed carry laws. semistructured interviews ranged in length from
30 to 90 minutes, with the average interview
lasting 60 minutes. to understand how the
study participants made sense of the decisionmaking process, we crafted a semi-structured
interview protocol designed to elicit narratives
exploring how campus-concealed carry legislation related to higher education, sensemaking processes of these legislative changes, and
interpretations for their residence life staffs.
the interview protocol posed questions to the
participant for specific examples of changes,
if any. an example of our questions is: "Describe the process of creating and/or updating campus living spaces policies to address
concealed carry." We also sought to find out
if there had been staff turnover specifically
due to the allowance of firearm possession in
campus living spaces. all interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Data Analysis Approach
our data analysis plan followed merriam and
tisdell's (2015) data analysis recommenda-

tions. each researcher independently reviewed
interview transcripts line-by-line (merriam
& tisdell, 2015). this open-coding process
allowed the researchers to review the interview
contents, make notes about emerging ideas,
and construct a rudimentary coding scheme.
after open-coding concluded, the researchers met to discuss their independent coding
schemes and to more fully develop a comprehensive set of themes. establishing an agreedupon coding scheme and related codebook
allowed the researchers to move forward with
their analysis. finally, the researchers uploaded
the interview transcripts to Dedoose, an online
qualitative software, and coded each interview
transcript. the findings presented in the next
section emerged as the most commonly discussed items.

Reliability & Validity
the researchers enter the conversation about
campus carry in living spaces at public institutions of higher education, as professors who
teach in higher education and student affairs
programs. one of the researchers began their
career in higher education as a residence life
graduate and hall director. We teach graduate
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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 3