DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03558.v1
title: ABC News/Washington Post Poll, June 2002
title: Version 1

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 give their opinions of President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, Bush's proposal to create the Department of Homeland Security, whether the Department of Homeland Security would improve the government's ability to prevent further terrorist attacks, and how much confidence they had in the ability of the government to prevent further terrorist attacks against Americans in the United States. Respondents also rated the job done by the FBI, the CIA, and other United States intelligence agencies in analyzing and sharing information about possible terrorist attacks before and after September 11, 2001, and commented on whether the agencies had enough information before the September 11th attacks to prevent the attacks or if the information was too vague and incomplete for the attacks to have been prevented. Further questions asked whether respondents supported giving FBI agents broader authority to monitor public places as part of a general investigation of terrorism even when it was not related to a specific crime, whether this change in FBI policy intruded on individuals' rights to privacy, whether it was more important for the FBI to investigate possible terrorist threats even if it intruded on personal privacy, and whether the FBI should not intrude on privacy, even if that meant compromising the FBI's ability to investigate possible terrorist threats. The next set of questions queried respondents on issues related to the Catholic Church, including whether respondents had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Catholic Church, whether they approved of the way the Church was handling the issue of sexual abuse of children by priests, and what they felt was responsible for the way the Church had dealt with these issues both now and in the past. Additional questions probed the respondents' opinions as to whether abusive priests should be automatically removed from the priesthood, whether recent news coverage had been fair to the Church, and whether respondents knew of any cases of abuse in their own community and parish. A final set of questions dealt with the 30th anniversary of Watergate. Respondents were asked how much they knew about Watergate, whether President Richard Nixon's actions were serious enough to warrant his resignation, and whether President Gerald Ford was right in pardoning Nixon. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, political party, education, religion and religious activities, Hispanic origin, race, and household income.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: ABC News/Washington Post Poll Series
description: Additional information about sampling, interviewing, weighting, and sampling error may be found in the codebook.
Produced by Taylor Nelson Sofres Intersearch, Horsham, PA, 2002.
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 at home at the time of the interview.