DOI: 10.3886/icpsr33488
title: CBS News National Survey, March #2, 2011
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded March 18-21, 2011, is a 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, the economy, foreign policy, and the federal budget deficit, whether they thought the country was headed in the right direction, and whether they approved of the way Congress was handling its job. Respondents were queried on the condition of the national economy, who they thought was mostly to blame for the current state of the nation's economy, and how serious a problem they thought the federal budget deficit was for the country. Opinions were gathered on Social Security, Medicare, nuclear power, gasoline prices, the Islam religion, and terrorism. Respondents were also asked how likely they thought it was that a major earthquake will happen in the United States in the next 20 years, whether they thought the federal government was prepared to deal with a major earthquake, how closely they have been following the uprising in Libya, whether they consider themselves to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement, whether they voted in the House of Representatives elections in 2010, whom they voted for in the 2008 presidential election, and how they would rate their current financial situation. Additional topics included same-sex marriage, the war in Afghanistan, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan, and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, employment status, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status, and whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians.
description: The data contain a weight variable that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, 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: Created variable labels and/or value labels.; 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 and older living in households with telephones in the United States. Smallest Geographic Unit: state
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).