DOI: 10.3886/icpsr06078.v2
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #2, May 1992
title: Version 2

description: This poll 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 comment on what they thought was the most important problem facing the country, and to give their approval rating of George Bush with respect to his handling of the presidency, foreign policy, and the economy. Questions were also posed regarding respondents' vote intentions for the 1992 presidential election, their opinions of potential 1992 presidential candidates, the likelihood of their voting in either a Republican or Democratic presidential primary or caucus, their candidate preferences for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, and issues presidential candidates should emphasize. Respondents were asked for their views on urban unrest, the political system, whether Ross Perot should endorse individual candidates for Congress, whether homosexuals should be allowed to serve in high governmental office and in the United States armed forces, and whether Bush, Bill Clinton, and Perot had revealed enough about where they stood on the issues. Those surveyed were queried regarding transportation, laws on recycling and air pollution, Bush's handling of the environment, and the problem of pollution in general. Questions pertaining to the environment focused on whether people were willing to pay additional taxes to have garbage and waste treated, whether jobs would be threatened if stricter environmental regulations were passed, whether it was acceptable to reduce spending on the environment, which presidential candidate would make the right decisions for the environment, and the Earth Summit in Brazil. The survey also posed a series of questions on welfare which addressed issues such as the failure of fathers to pay child support, increasing federal spending on programs for the poor, the political party likely to reform the welfare system so that waste and cheating were reduced, whether welfare encouraged the poor to stay poor, increasing job training programs for people on welfare, whether people were using welfare for a short period of time or depending on it, and whether being on welfare encouraged larger families. Additional welfare questions dealt with whether women on welfare should get more money if they had additional children, whether the welfare system discouraged pregnant women from getting married, the availability of jobs for most welfare recipients, and whether most who received welfare could go without it. Background information on respondents includes sex, age, race, marital status, education, family income, religious preference, political orientation, and party preference.
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: A weight variable has been included and must be used for any analysis.
description: Adult population of the United States aged 18 and over having telephones at home.
description: A variation of random-digit dialing 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. 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]).