DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34600.v1
title: CBS News/New York Times National Poll, March #1, 2012
title: Version 1

description: This poll, fielded March, 2012, and the first of two, is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on a range of political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling his job as president, foreign policy, the economy, and the situation with Iran. Respondents were also asked about the condition of the economy, and whether things in the country were on the right track. Multiple questions addressed the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, including respondents' overall opinions of several of the candidates and their views, as well as their confidence in each candidate's ability to make the right decisions about the economy and health care, and ability to be an effective commander-in-chief of the nation's military. Further questions asked what issues and qualities were most important in deciding who to support for the Republican nomination, what topics they would like to hear the candidates discuss, and which candidate would have the best chance of winning against Barack Obama. Other topics include Iran, birth control, and gasoline. Demographic variables include sex, age, race, education level, household income, social class, employment status, religious preference and participation, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), whether respondents thought of themselves as born-again Christians, marital status, household composition, political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status, voting behavior, and the number of phones in their household.
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 and 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).