DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02170.v1
title: Washington Post Prince William County [Virginia] Poll, January 1997
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll, conducted January 9-12, 1997, solicited responses from Virginia residents of Prince William County and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park on a range of community and quality of life issues specific to their locale. Respondents were asked to rate Prince William County as a place to live, and commented on past, current, and future trends in their quality of life. Those polled identified the most important problem facing Prince William County, whether they would like to live in Prince William County in five years, and whether they would move if housing was not less expensive there relative to other areas around Washington. Respondents were asked to assess the treatment of residents of the east and west sides of the county by government officials, how well their local government was providing public services, as well as the availability of cultural activities, entertainment, and retail stores and restaurants in Prince William County. Residents were also asked for their opinion on problems facing their local public schools, such as overcrowding, gang violence, and poor school facilities, and whether they would be willing to sacrifice city services or pay more taxes to provide more money to public schools. Other topics covered the growth rate in Prince William County, and whether limits should be placed on residential and commercial development. Additional questions asked respondents how long they had lived in the Prince William County area, the location of their previous residence, and whether they had any children living in and attending school in Prince William County. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, education level, marital status, political party affiliation, 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: Washington Post Prince William County [Virginia] Poll, January 1997, Dataset 0001
description: ABC News/Washington Post Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
The data available for download are not weighted, and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
Additional information about sampling, interviewing, and sampling error may be found in the codebook.
 Original reports using these data may be found via the Washington Post Opinion Surveys and Polls Web site. 
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.
According to the data collection instrument, code 3 in the variable Q909 included respondents who answered that they had attended a technical school.
To protect respondent confidentiality, zip codes in variable Q44 were blanked, and respondent names were removed from the public use data file.
Value labels for unknown codes were added in variables AGE, Q4, and Q43.
The CASEID variable was created for use with online analysis.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in Prince William County and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park, Virginia.
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.