DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03743.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #1, January 2003
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, foreign policy, and the economy, as well as their views on the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the United States Congress. Their views were sought on what effect the Republican-controlled Congress will have on homeland security, the economy, taxes, opportunities for minorities, and health care. A series of questions addressed the current situation in Iraq, including whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had kept his promise to United Nations weapons inspectors, whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, what the appropriate action by the United States should be, whether the respondent expected the United States to take military action against Iraq, and what action the respondent thought the United States should take. In addition, respondents were asked for their reaction to reports that North Korea had resumed production of nuclear weapons and whether North Korea or Iraq posed the greatest threat to world peace and stability. A series of questions probed respondents' views on their concern for the safety of children and whether the news media's coverage of child abductions had been accurate or out of proportion. Respondents were asked whether the kidnapping of children had increased since he/she was a child, how many children were abducted by strangers each year, whether a child was more likely to be abducted by a stranger or by an acquaintance/family member, and whether the public should have access to information on convicted sex offenders, including their addresses. Those polled were asked a series of questions on the subject of health, with a focus on high blood pressure and hypertension. Respondents were asked to assess the frequency with which they participated in the following activities: drinking caffeinated beverages, adding salt to food, consuming alcoholic beverages, selecting low-fat food, exercising for at least 30 minutes, having a regular exam by a physician, and having their blood pressure and cholesterol levels checked. Respondent knowledge of the link between high blood pressure and diabetes, stroke, heart attack, cancer, and kidney disease was assessed. Those queried were asked to describe the frequency with which they experienced headaches/migraines, back/neck pain, stomach/ulcer pain, joint pain/arthritis, and menstrual/reproductive/pelvic pain. In addition, respondents were asked to rate their average daily pain, whether they had ever been diagnosed as having chronic pain, what methods of pain management they employed, and whether they viewed alternative therapies as an effective treatment for pain. Additional items elicited respondents' views on abortion, whether the policies of the Bush administration treated the rich and the poor fairly, whether the United States was winning the war on terrorism, the method of transportation the respondent used to get to school as a child, and the method of transportation used by their children. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, voter registration and participation history, political party, political orientation, marital status, religion, education, Hispanic descent, race, children in household, and household income.
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: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
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, 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.
The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.
description: Adult population of the United States aged 18 and over having a telephone at home.
description: 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. 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).