DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02150.v2
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #3 and Call-Back, September 1995
title: Version 2

description: This poll is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on a range of political and social issues. This survey focused on the O.J. Simpson murder trial, with an initial survey after the closing arguments were concluded and a call-back of some of the respondents after the verdict was announced. Initial questions examined respondents' confidence in the American justice system, their opinions on what they believed were the prosecution's and defense's strongest pieces of evidence, and whether they believed O.J. Simpson to be guilty or not guilty. Respondents were also asked in the initial survey how closely they followed the trial and whether the lawyers and Judge Lance Ito behaved properly during the trial. In the call-back portion of this survey, respondents were queried as to whether they agreed with the not-guilty verdict and whether they believed the jury spent enough time in deliberations. They were also queried as to whether the Simpson trial would make them less or more likely to serve on a jury and whether television had made a difference in the outcome. Respondents were asked for their opinions on the criminal justice system in general and whether it was biased for or against Blacks. Background information on respondents in the initial survey includes voter registration status, political party, political orientation, education, age, sex, race, and family income. Age is the only demographic information provided in the call-back.
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) A weight variable has been included and must be used for any analysis. (2) The documentation is provided 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 through the ICPSR Website on the Internet.
description: Adult population of the United States aged 18 and over having telephones 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]). A total of 1,569 respondents were initially contacted after the closing arguments were concluded, and 1,241 respondents were called back after the verdict was announced.