DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02169.v1
title: Washington Post Federal Election Commission Poll, January 1997
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll, conducted January 14-19, 1996, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on the presidency and on a range of political and social issues. The focus of this data collection was campaign finance laws and the pending reform of those laws. Respondents were asked for their opinion and level of knowledge on campaign finance laws, use of campaign funds, the federal government's campaign finance activities, and the public funding of federal elections. Additional topics covered various proposals for campaign finance reform, special interest group contributions, restrictions on political advertising, and the reasons why people contribute to campaigns. Respondents were also asked for their political contribution history, and for their opinions on the influence and access that political contributors gain from their contributions. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, education level, employment status, household income, political party affiliation, political orientation, and voter registration status and participation history.
description: The data contain a weight variable (WEIGHT) that should be used in analyzing the data. This poll consists of "standard" national representative samples of the adult population with sample balancing of sex, race, age, and education.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created online analysis version with question text..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Washington Post Federal Election Commission Poll, January 1997, Dataset 0001
description: ABC News/Washington Post Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
 (1) The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis. (2) Additional information about sampling, interviewing, and sampling error may be found in the codebook. (3) Original reports using these data may be found via the Washington Post Opinion Surveys and Polls Web site. (4) The meaning of the variable SELECTB is unknown and may be associated with the sampling method of selecting a respondent based on the adult living in the household who last had a birthday. (5) According to the data collection instrument, code 3 in the variable EDUC includes respondents who answered that they had attended a technical school. (6) A value label for an unknown code was added in the AGE variable. (7) The CASEID variable was created for use with online analysis.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in the contiguous 48 United States.
description: Households were selected by random-digit dialing. Within households, the respondent selected was the adult living in the household who last had a birthday and who was home at the time of the interview.