DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34464
title: CBS News National Poll, December #1, 2011
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded December of 2011 and the first of two, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. Respondents were asked how well Barack Obama was handling the presidency, foreign policy, the economy, terrorism, and job creation. Further questions were asked whether Obama was a strong leader, whether Obama had the same priorities for the country, whether Obama's presidency had brought different groups of Americans together, whether Obama had a clear idea for a second term, whether Obama fought hard for his policies, and whether Obama was down-to-earth. Additional topics included whether Congress was performing their job well, whether the country was moving in the right direction, whether the Republicans in Congress or Obama and the Democrats were to blame for the difficulties in passing legislation, and who was to blame for the state of the nation's economy. Respondents were also queried on whether they approved of the health care law and whether it affected them personally. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, household composition, education level, household income, employment status, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status, voting behavior, and whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians.
description: The data contain a weight variable that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, the data were weighted to match United States Census Bureau breakdowns on age, sex, race, education, and region of the country. The data were also adjusted for the fact that people who share a telephone with others have less chance to be contacted than people who live alone and have their own telephones, and that households with more than one telephone number have more chances to be called than households with only one telephone number.
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: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview
description: Smallest Geographic Unit: congressional district
description: A variation of random-digit dialing (RDD) 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. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard land-lines and cell phones. 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).