DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03754.v1
title: CBS News Monthly Poll #1, March 2003
title: Version 1

description: This poll 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 to give their opinions of President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, foreign policy, the economy, and the situation with Iraq. Their familiarity with and understanding of possible United States military action against Iraq were assessed. Topics covered whether the Bush administration was open to non-militaristic options, whether military action should be taken without the support of United States' allies, including France and Russia, and/or United Nations approval, whether United Nations weapons inspectors should be given more time, and whether the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was an appropriate use of military action. Those queried were asked whether they believed Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction to be a threat against the United States requiring immediate military action, whether Iraq could be contained with additional inspections, or whether Iraq posed no significant threat. Respondents were asked whether the Bush administration had presented enough evidence to justify the immediate use of military action, whether the United States should take military action with Great Britain's support, and whether war with Iraq was likely to lead to a larger war with other countries in the Middle East. Those polled were asked to assess the threat of terrorism, including whether military action in Iraq would increase the threat of terrorism against the United States, the likelihood of a terrorist attack against the United States in the next few months, and who was winning the war against terrorism. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, voter registration and participation history, political party, political orientation, marital status, religion, education, Hispanic descent, race, and household income.
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: This collection has not been processed by ICPSR staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this collection in essentially the same form in which they were received. When appropriate, documentation has been converted to Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been converted to non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity.
The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.
description: Adult population of the United States aged 18 and over having a telephone 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).