DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34615.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times/60 Minutes/Vanity Fair National Poll, May #2, 2012
title: Version 1

description: This poll, the last of two fielded May 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 Congress and the Supreme Court were performing their jobs, whether justices should allow their own politics to sway their legal decisions, whether justices should continue to be appointed for life, and whether the country was moving in the right direction. Multiple questions addressed student loan debt, including whether the government should deduct unpaid loans from the loan-holder's wages, whether student loan debt should be cleared if the loan-holder files bankruptcy, whether respondents have taken out student loans, and whether they are worried about repaying student loans. Respondents were also queried as to whether they had gone back to school recently, whether they'd completed their degree, whether the additional training had earned them a promotion or a new job, and whether the additional education was a worthwhile investment. Additional topics include the 2010 health care law, vacation time, summer activities, and illegal immigration. 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, whether respondents were registered to vote, whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians, whether respondents had children and whether any of them were between 12 and 18 years of age, whether respondents had children who were going to attend or attending college, voting behavior, and whether respondents had defaulted on a student loan.
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).