DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34617
title: CBS News/New York Times National Poll, July #1, 2012
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded July 2012, and the first of two, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling his job as president, foreign policy, the economy, and health care. Respondents were also asked about the condition of the economy and whether things in the country were on the right track. Additional questions addressed the respondent's overall opinions of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and their views. Multiple questions addressed respondents' opinions of both Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's economic policies and whether their policies will favor the rich versus the poor. Additional questions asked respondents which candidate they thought would do a better job handling a variety of issues and how important these issues will be in deciding how they will vote for president. Further questions asked respondents if they were willing to have reduced local government services, such as schools and fire and police departments, if it meant paying less in taxes. Other topics include the Supreme Court, financial institutions, same-sex marriage, crime, and tax cuts. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, education level, household income, social class, employment status, religious preference and participation, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians, marital status, household composition, political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status, voting behavior, and the number of phones in their household.
description: The data contain a weight variable that should be used in analyzing the data. The data were weighted to match 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: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview
description: Persons aged 18 years or older living in households with telephones in the Unites States. Smallest Geographic Unit: congressional district
description: A variation of random-digit dialing (RDD) 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 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).