DOI: 10.3886/icpsr27804.v1
title: CBS News Call-Back Poll, September 2009
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll, fielded September 10, 2009, re-interviewed 648 adults first surveyed August 27-31 2009. This continuing series of monthly surveys solicit public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. The dataset includes their responses to call-back questions as well as to selected questions in the original poll (ICPSR 27803) which asked whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling the presidency, the war in Afghanistan, health care, and the economy. Several questions addressed health care, including whether respondents thought the health care system in the United States worked well, whether Medicare worked well, and whether the government would do a better job than private health care companies in keeping health care costs down and providing medical coverage. Respondents were also asked their opinions on whether President Obama's proposals for reform would increase competition in the private insurance market, the health insurance industry, whether they believed in the possibility of expanding health care coverage without increasing budget deficits or taxes on the middle class, whether President Obama or the Republicans in Congress had better ideas about reforming the health care system, and whether they understood the health care reforms that Congress was considering. Whether President Obama's proposals for reform would increase competition in the private insurance market, whether the health care reform proposed by President Obama would make health care better in the United States and would help the respondent personally, and whether respondents favored the ideas of requiring all Americans to buy health insurance and the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan. Information was collected on how respondents thought health care reforms under consideration in Congress would effect the middle class, senior citizens, small businesses, the respondent personally, their health care costs, and the quality of health care. Additional topics that were covered included the pullout of troops from Iraq, credit card debt, how the federal government should use taxpayer's money, personal finances, the best way to discourage obesity, terrorist attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the swine flu, and job security. Respondents were re-interviewed on September 10, 2009, and asked whether they approved of the way Barak Obama was handling health care, if they had listened to the president's address of September 9th, the clarity of his explanation in regard to reform, if they agreed with the proposed reforms, whether Congress would pass and President Obama would sign a bill reforming the system. Questions in regard to budget deficit, expanded health care, regulation of the health insurance industry were also asked. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, political party affiliation, political philosophy, perceived social class, religious preference, and voter registration status and participation history.
description: The data contain weight variables (WGHT) that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, the data were weighted to match the 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: Performed consistency checks.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it a unique identifier.
A truncated value label in variable EDUC was corrected.
This data collection includes responses to questions from the original poll as well as to the call-back poll. Original survey questions are identified with the prefix "Q", while call-back questions are identified as "RQ".
This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, NY.
description: Persons aged 18 years and older living in households with telephones in the United States.
description: The call-back poll re-interviewed respondents who had participated in a poll fielded August 27-31, 2009. 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. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard and 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).