DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03983.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #1, December 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 approval ratings for President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, Iraq, and the economy. Questions sought respondents' perceptions of the state of the economy and how it would progress in the future, their perception of George W. Bush's personal qualities, such as his level of honesty and integrity, and how much respondents knew about the recently passed Medicare bill. Respondents' opinions were elicited on potential Democratic presidential nominees such as former Vermont governor Howard Dean, Senator John Edwards, and Senator John Kerry. They were asked who they would vote for in the 2004 presidential election, how much issues like the war in Iraq and gay marriage would affect that decision, and whether they thought the Republicans or the Democrats better handled particular issues, such as senior prescription drugs or terrorism. Questions regarding the war in Iraq included whether respondents felt that the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was worth the lost American lives and other costs, whether the Bush administration had a clear plan for rebuilding Iraq, whether the Bush administration was telling everything they knew about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and whether the public should be able to see pictures of the military honor guard receiving caskets returning from Iraq to the United States. Questions concerning the war on terrorism included whether the Bush administration had a clearly planned campaign for the war against terrorism and whether respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Questions regarding gay marriage included whether the respondent believed that the question of "marriage" was a legal or a religious one, whether such marriages were "wrong," and whether they would support a law that allowed homosexuals to marry. On the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, respondents were asked whether they were bothered by hearing about professional athletes and Olympic athletes using them and how many athletes they thought used steroids. Background information was gathered on political identification, voting record, religious preference, marital status, level of education, age, ethnicity, annual household income, alternate phone numbers, and willingness for callback.
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: (1) 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).