DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02874
title: CBS NEWS "CBS.Marketwatch.com" Millennium Poll, December 1999
title: Archival Version

description: This special topic poll, fielded December 17-19, 1999, focused on respondents' anticipation of life in the 21st century as the year 2000 approached. Those queried were asked to predict the quality of life in the 21st century on a variety of dimensions including war, terrorism, length of the working day, religion, the environment, equality for Blacks, and poverty. They were also asked to assess the impact of the United States on global popular culture, politics, art, music, and economics. Views were sought on the future of current prominent businesses including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, General Electric, and Ford, and respondents were asked to select the most important business leader of the 20th century from a list including United States Steel founder Andrew Carnegie, Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and IBM founder Thomas Watson. Looking ahead to the end of the 21st century, respondents were asked which of the following innovations/trends would still be in use/existence: VCR, telephone, compact discs, printed books, the Internet, post office mail, cars fueled by gasoline, marriage, retirement at age 65, children raised by two parents, various languages, and going to the office to work. A series of questions addressed the use of medical technology in the 21st century, including the cloning of humans, women aged 50 and over bearing children, people living to age 100, genetically engineered babies, altering genes to limit the risk of developing certain genetic diseases, and altering the genetic make-up of plants, fruits, and vegetables. Additional topics covered whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, robots that act like humans, vacation cruises to outerspace, whether the "new century" begins on January 1, 2000, or on January 1, 2001, belief in Armageddon, Internet commerce, and attention paid to the 2000 political campaigns. The results of this survey were announced on the CBS website CBS.Marketwatch.com. Background information on respondents includes age, sex, political party, political orientation, education, religion, race, Hispanic descent, marital status, family income, age of children in household, and computer access.
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: 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.