DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03709.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times New Jersey State Survey, October 2002
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on the presidency and a range of other political and social issues. The study was conducted in part to assess respondents' interest in and opinions about the 2002 elections in New Jersey. Residents of that state were asked to give their opinions of President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, as well as their views of United States Senators Jon Corzine and Robert Torricelli, New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, and former United States Senator Frank Lautenberg. Those queried were asked whether they intended to vote in the November 5, 2002, elections, and for whom they would vote if the election for United States Senator were held that day, given a choice between Lautenberg (Democratic Party) and Douglas Forrester (Republican Party). Respondents were also asked if Lautenberg and Forrester had spent more time during the campaign attacking each other or explaining what they would do if elected, whether they found the Senate race interesting or dull, what they considered to be the most important issue in deciding how to vote, and whether they considered their vote as a vote for or against Bush. Those polled answered sets of questions comparing Lautenberg and Forrester as Senate candidates in terms of their experience, honesty, integrity, age, political orientation, position on Iraq, and their potential decisions on United States Supreme Court nominees. A series of questions addressed the withdrawal of Torricelli from the Senate race and Lautenberg's replacement of him: whether Torricelli did the right thing by withdrawing, whether it was fair that the Democrats replaced him on the ballot, whether the New Jersey Supreme Court made the right decision by allowing his replacement, and whether that decision had made a difference in how the respondent intended to vote. Respondents' views were sought on the use of tax dollars to pay for abortions for indigent women, increased restrictions on the sale of handguns, whether the sentence for a murder conviction should be the death penalty or life in prison without parole, whether companies responsible for major pollution problems should be held accountable for the clean-up costs, and whether the government should cover losses incurred by individuals who chose to invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. Additional questions probed respondents' views on corruption in New Jersey politics, the importance of which political party controls the United States Congress, the influence of Lautenberg and Forrester campaign advertisements, and whether the respondent would vote for musician Bruce Springsteen if he were a candidate for United States Senator from New Jersey. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, political party, political orientation, voter registration and participation history, handgun ownership, education, religion, marital status, Hispanic descent, race, years in community, 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: (1) 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. (2) 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.
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 state of New Jersey 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).