DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02784.v2
title: CBS News Monthly Poll #4, April 1999
title: Version 2

description: This poll, fielded April 22, 1999, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys 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 conflict in Kosovo. Additional questions dealing with the Kosovo intervention focused on how closely respondents had followed news of the conflict, whether they favored or opposed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes and the potential use of NATO ground troops, and whether the United States should do more for fleeing Kosovar refugees. On another topic, views were solicited on the threat of violence in public schools. Respondents were queried as to how safe they thought schools were, and whether more or less security was needed. Opinions were sought on the potential use of various security measures, such as stationing police officers in schools, the use of metal detectors, and random searching of student lockers. Opinions were also solicited on how serious a problem weapons in public schools were, how difficult it is to predict potentially violent students, and the role the federal government should take in ensuring safety in local schools. Particular attention was given to the April 20, 1999, school shootings in Littleton, Colorado. Respondents were asked how closely they had followed the news of that event, why they thought this incident happened, the role the Internet plays in school violence, and the likelihood for incidents like the one in Littleton to occur again. On a related topic, respondents were asked about their views toward banning assault weapons and handguns, their own households' ownership of guns, and their opinions of the National Rifle Association. Background information on respondents includes age, race, education, sex, marital status, political party, political orientation, age of children in household, and family income.
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 variable labels and/or value labels..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: (1) This collection has not been processed by ICPSR staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this collection in essentially the same form in which they were received. When appropriate, hardcopy documentation has been converted to machine-readable form and variables have been recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity. (2) The codebook is provided as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided through the ICPSR Website on the Internet.
The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.