DOI: 10.3886/icpsr31566.v1
title: CBS News Monthly Poll, March 2010
title: Version 1

description: This poll, fielded March 18-22, 2010, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way that Barack Obama was handling his job as president, the economy, and health care, whether they approved of the way Congress was handling its job, and whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Respondents were queried on how closely they had been following the health care legislation being debated in Congress, whether they approved of health care reform, whether they thought that the health care reform bill would personally effect them, whether they understood the health care reform bill, and whether they thought that the health care bill would make health care better or worse in the next few years. Respondents were also asked whether they thought that the health care reform bill would make sure that health insurance companies would provide health coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions, help control the cost of health care premiums, and lead to too much government involvement in the health care system. Information was collected on whether respondents thought Congress spent too much time dealing with health care reform, whether they thought that Republicans and Democrats have been trying to pass or defeat the health care bill because it was good policy or mainly for political reasons, and whether they thought that the rules and procedures used in Congress to pass health care reform were fair or not. Respondents were also asked how they thought things were going for the United States in its efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq, how they thought things were going for the United States in the war in Afghanistan, and their views on abortion. Finally, respondents were asked whether they had some form of health insurance and whether they were covered by health insurance through an employer, a union, a personal plan, or through Medicare or Medicaid. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status, and whether respondents thought of themselves as born again Christians.
description: The data contain weight variables 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: Performed consistency checks.; Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it a unique identifier.
A truncated value label in variable EDUC was corrected.
This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, NY.
description: Persons aged 18 years and older living in households with telephones in the United States.
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).