DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03430
title: ABC News "Nightline" Catholic Church Poll, February 2002
title: Archival Version

description: This special topic poll was undertaken to gauge
 respondents' reactions and feelings regarding the recent allegations
 of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and cover-ups by the
 Catholic Church. The poll also attempted to assess how these
 allegations had influenced respondents' feelings about the Catholic
 Church in general. Respondents were asked if they had heard of the
 scandal surrounding Catholic priest John Geoghan, a Boston clergyman
 accused of molesting over 80 children, if the case had concerned them,
 how serious a problem they viewed sexual abuse of children by priests
 to be, and how often they thought that sexual abuse by priests
 occurred. Those queried were then asked if they thought the Catholic
 Church was doing enough to address the problem of sexual abuse by
 priests, if they thought the recent allegations had harmed the overall
 reputation of the Catholic Church, if they thought Catholic priests
 were more likely then other men to sexually abuse children, and if
 they believed that the policy of the Catholic Church prohibiting
 priests from marrying contributed to the problem. Finally, respondents
 were asked a series of questions designed to assess their opinions of
 the Catholic Church's past responses to allegations of sexual
 misconduct and their ideas on how the Church should respond in the
 future. They were asked whether they agreed with the church's response
 of transferring a priest who had been accused of sexual abuse to
 another parish, whether they believed that the church should inform
 parishioners and/or police if a parish priest was accused of sexually
 abusing a child, and whether the church should be required by law to
 inform police or parishioners. The results of the poll were announced
 on the ABC television program "Nightline." Background information on
 respondents includes age, gender, political party, education,
 religion, typical attendance of religious services, and
 ethnicity. Catholic respondents were also asked how much they trusted
their own parish priest around children.
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
interview.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: ABC News "Nightline" Catholic Church Poll, February 2002
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with
telephones in the contiguous 48 United States.
description: (1) The data are provided as an SPSS portable file.
 (2) Additional information about sampling, interviewing, weighting,
 and sampling error may be found in the codebook. (3) 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, documentation has been
 converted to Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been
 converted to non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been
 recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity. (4) The codebook is provided
 by ICPSR 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 on the ICPSR
Web site.