DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03755.v2
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #2, March 2003
title: Version 2

description: This poll is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked to give their opinions of President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, foreign policy, the economy, the situation with Iraq, and the situation with North Korea, as well as their views on the United Nations and its handling of the situation with Iraq. Their views were sought on which of the following issues should receive the most congressional attention in the coming year: the economy, fighting the war on terror, handling the situation in Iraq, or dealing with the situation in North Korea. Respondents were asked to assess their confidence in Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the situation in Iraq and the use of military force to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. Their views were sought on whether there was sufficient evidence that military action was necessary, whether Congress was asking enough questions, whether diplomatic solutions had been exhausted, and whether the United States should do what it believed to be right, despite the lack of a supporting United Nations resolution, the views of allies such as France and Russia, and the views of anti-war protesters. A series of questions focused on the motivation of the Bush administration and on the recent press conference, in which Bush outlined the United States position on Iraq. Questions focused on the seriousness of the Iraqi threat, whether weapons inspectors had made progress, needed additional time, and had received the cooperation of Iraq, and which of the following they believed to be of greatest interest to the Bush administration: ending the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, removing weapons of mass destruction, removing Saddam Hussein from power, protecting the supply of oil to the United States, or Bush's personal desire to accomplish what his father's administration failed to do. Respondents were asked if any of these objectives were worth the potential casualties and deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Those polled were asked about the implications of a war with Iraq: whether the removal of Hussein would lead to greater stability in the Middle East, how a war would impact the United States economy, whether the threat of terrorism against the United States would increase, and whether a clear plan existed for rebuilding Iraq after a war. In response to North Korea's announcement that they had developed nuclear weapons, respondents were asked for their opinions on the seriousness of this situation. In addition, respondents were asked whether Iraq or North Korea posed the greater threat to world peace and stability. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, voter registration and participation history, political party, political orientation, marital status, religion, education, Hispanic descent, race, and household income.
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 variable labels and/or value labels..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: This collection has not been processed by ICPSR staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this collection in essentially the same form in which they were received. When appropriate, documentation has been converted to Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been converted to non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity.
The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.
description: Adult population of the United States aged 18 and over having a telephone at home.
description: A variation of random-digit dialing using primary sampling units (PSUs) was employed, consisting of blocks of 100 telephone numbers identical through the eighth digit and stratified by geographic region, area code, and size of place. Within households, respondents were selected using a method developed by Leslie Kish and modified by Charles Backstrom and Gerald Hursh (see Backstrom and Hursh, SURVEY RESEARCH. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963).