DOI: 10.3886/icpsr27803
title: CBS News Monthly Poll, August 2009
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded August 27-31, 2009, 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 whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling the presidency, foreign policy, the situation in Afghanistan, health care, and the economy. Respondents were asked if they thought things in the country were on the right track, their rating of the national economy, and whether they thought the economy would get better. Respondents were also asked questions about the economic recession, including how long they thought it would last, the advisability of the federal government spending money to stimulate the national economy, whether it was acceptable to raise the deficit to create jobs and stimulate growth, and whether the federal budget deficit affected the respondent's family's financial situation. Several questions addressed health care, including whether respondents thought our health care system 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 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 Barack Obama or the Republicans in Congress had better ideas about reforming the health care system, and whether they understood the health care reforms Congress was considering. Information was collected on how respondents thought health care reforms under consideration in Congress would affect 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, major credit cards, credit card debt, how the federal government should use taxpayer's money, how to handle the deficit, personal finances, the best way to discourage obesity, and job security. 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 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: 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).