DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34612
title: CBS News/New York Times National Poll, April #1, 2012
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, the first of two fielded April 2012, 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 how well Barack Obama was handling the presidency, terrorism, the economy, the war in Afghanistan, the housing market, and the issue of gasoline prices. Opinions were collected on whether respondents thought the country was headed in the right direction, the most important problem facing the nation, whether Congress was performing their job well, and the national economy. Respondents were also queried on their opinions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, as well as whether either of the two presidential candidates would be able to bring real change to Washington, whether they would be able to make the right decisions on various issues, and whether they would be an effective military leader. Additional topics included economic concerns, the suspension of Rick Santorum's presidential campaign, women's health issues, the future of the next generation of Americans, gasoline prices, the home mortgage crisis, federal income tax policies and the capital gains tax policy, the John Edwards trial, and the college education of the respondent's child. Finally, respondents were asked whether they voted in the 2008 presidential election and who they voted for, whether they supported the Tea Party movement, whether they usually vote Democratic or Republican, whether they planned to vote in a 2012 primary or caucus, how much attention they have paid to the 2012 presidential campaign, and whether they were registered to vote. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, social class, marital status, household makeup, education level, household income, employment status, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, 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. 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 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).