DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34590.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times National Poll, January #2, 2012
title: Version 1

description: This poll, the second of three fielded January 2012, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. Respondents were asked how well Barack Obama was handling the presidency, foreign policy, the economy, and the threat of terrorism. Multiple questions addressed which Republican presidential candidates were favored, which were most likely to win against President Obama, which candidates were most trusted to handle various political issues, as well as whether President Obama and the Republicans in Congress were working together. Additional topics included the role of religion in elections, campaign financing, the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements, wealth distribution, and social class. Opinions were also sought about the most important problem facing the country at that time, and whether respondents felt the country was moving in the right direction. Finally, respondents were asked whether they voted in the 2008 presidential election and who they voted for, whether they had been contacted on behalf of any of the presidential candidates, and whether they were registered to vote. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, employment status, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, and whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians.
description: The data contain a weight variable that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, 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 United 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).