DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34654.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times National Poll, October #3, 2012
title: Version 1

description: This poll, the last of three fielded October 2012, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. A number of questions were asked about respondents' voting intentions for and opinions of the 2012 presidential campaign and election, as well as the 2012 election for the United States House of Representatives. Respondents were also asked if they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling the presidency, foreign policy, and the economy, whether the country was headed in the right direction, and if they approved of the way Congress was handling its job. Further questions asked about the condition of the economy, the Bush-era tax cuts, illegal immigration, the best way to reduce the federal budget deficit, their opinion of Obama, Romney, Biden, and Ryan, and the most important issues in deciding how to vote in the presidential election. Additional topics included respondents' views on Obama's economic policies, the recent attack on the American consulate in Libya and the killing of the United States ambassador, abortion, the health care law, Medicare, withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and Iran. Finally, respondents were asked about their main source of political news and information, whether they were a supporter of the Tea Party movement, and how much attention they had been able to pay to the 2012 presidential campaign. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, social class, marital status, household composition, education level, household income, employment status, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voting history, 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. 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: Persons aged 18 years or older living in households with telephones in the Unites States. 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).