DOI: 10.3886/icpsr26945.v1
title: CBS News Monthly Poll #2, March 2009
title: Version 1

description: This poll, fielded March 20-22, 2009, 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 whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling the presidency and issues such as the economy, the financial institutions bailout, insurance company AIG bonuses, and foreign policy. Views were sought on the condition of the national economy, and the level of confidence in Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner's handling of the financial crisis. Respondents were also asked their views on companies receiving federal bailout money, whether they approved of the federal government providing money to banks and other financial institutions, whether the media, President Obama, and Congress was spending to much time on the bonuses paid to AIG executives, and whether Congress was spending the right amount of time trying to solve the nation's economic problems. Several additional questions addressed AIG including whether AIG could have found a way not to pay bonuses to their executives, whether the federal government should try to recover the money used for bonuses, how many of the executives respondents thought would return the bonuses, and whether the federal government should give additional financial assistance to AIG if needed. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, political party affiliation, political philosophy, and voter registration status and participation history.
description: The data contain weight variables 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: Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it an unique identifier.
Responses in the variable Q29 (ZIP Code) were blanked to protect respondent confidentiality.
A truncated value label in the variable EDUC was corrected.
This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, NY.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in the United States.
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. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard and 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).