DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03693.v2
title: CBS News Monthly Poll #2, April 2002
title: Version 2

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, the situation in the Middle East, and the campaign against terrorism, as well as their views of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Pope John Paul II, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. A series of questions addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Respondents were asked whether they sympathized with Israel or the Palestinians, whether Israel should alter its military presence in the occupied territories, and whether the United States should publicly support either side. Respondents were questioned as to whether they believed Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East would be successful, whether the United States government has a responsibility to establish peace in the Middle East, and whether they believed involvement in the conflict would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks against America. Those polled were questioned about the sexual abuse allegations against Catholic priests. Respondents were asked what they believed to be the greatest problem facing the Catholic Church, whether the child sex accusations harmed the reputation of the Catholic Church, whether celibacy increased the likelihood of child sex abuse, and whether they believed the Pope was aware of the abuse before the allegations were made public. Lastly, respondents were asked whether they believed surveillance cameras on city streets reduced crime or invaded people's privacy, and whether they approved of the placement of surveillance cameras on sites that are important to the country's history. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, race, religion, education, political party, political orientation, marital status, number of children in the 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).