DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34667.v1
title: CBS News/60 Minutes/Vanity Fair National Poll, December #1, 2012
title: Version 1

description: This poll, the first of two fielded December 2012, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. Respondents were asked how well Barack Obama was handling the presidency on issues such as foreign policy, the economy, terrorism, taxes, and the budget deficit. Opinions were collected on the progress of the economy, the job market, the performance of Congress, feelings toward Washington, and whether the country was heading in the right direction. The respondents were also asked for their opinions of the Republican and Democratic parties, Barack Obama, John Boehner, Hillary Clinton, and the difficulty in reaching agreements and passing legislation in Congress. Data were collected on tax increases and spending cuts, expectations of the negotiations between the two parties, the preferred plan for reducing the budget deficit, and whether the respondents approved of Congress raising the federal debt ceiling. Respondents were also asked their views about illegal immigrants, ongoing violence in Syria, gun control laws, the recent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and safety of schools, holiday shopping, and New Year's Eve plans. Additional topics included the worst date movie, the least interesting movie, the most difficult job in Hollywood, expected changes to the Oscars broadcast, quintessential actor and actress, and preference of a great movie over a powerful documentary. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voting behavior, whether respondents were registered to vote, 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: 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: 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).