DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02177.v1
title: ABC News/Washington Post Poll, March 1997
title: Version 1

description: This poll, conducted March 6-9, 1997, is part of a continuing series of monthly polls 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 Bill Clinton and his handling of the presidency, the economy, and foreign affairs, as well as their views on First Lady Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Those queried were asked if they supported a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, decreases in military spending, decreases in entitlement program spending, and requiring a three-fifths majority vote to raise taxes. A series of questions addressed campaign contributions. Topics included use of the White House as a fundraising tool, permitting contributors to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom and attend special luncheons at the White House, Al Gore's use of White House telephones to solicit campaign contributions, and Clinton's commitment to campaign finance reform. Demographic variables include age, race, sex, education level, political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status and participation history, and household income.
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: ABC News/Washington Post Poll, March 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) Original reports using these data may be found via the ABC News Polling Unit Web site and via the Washington Post Opinion Surveys and Polls Web site. (3) 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. (4) According to the data collection instrument, code 3 in the variable Q909 also includes respondents who answered that they had attended a technical college. (5) Value labels for unknown codes were added in the variables RECODED_AGE. (6) 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.