DOI: 10.3886/icpsr23021
title: CBS News/New York Times Monthly Poll #2, February 2007
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded February 23-27, 2007, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way George W. Bush was handling his job as president and other issues such as foreign policy. They also were asked to rate the condition of the national economy, what was the most important domestic policy for the president and Congress to focus on, and whether they approved of the way Congress was handling its job. Opinions were solicited on the topic of health care, including how well the United States health care system works, the cost of health care, the federal government's responsibility to guarantee health care for all Americans, whether taxes should be increased in order to expand health care to all Americans, and whether employers should be required to provide insurance for all their workers. A series of questions asked for respondents' opinions on advertisements by drug companies, including whether they are helpful to consumers, whether prescription drug advertisements on television should be limited by the government, whether it was acceptable for doctors to be paid by drug companies to promote prescription drugs, and whether Congress should change the law to allow Americans to buy lower cost prescription drugs from Canada. Respondents were asked whether the government would do a better job than private insurance companies in providing medical coverage and holding down health care costs, which issues they would like most to hear the 2008 presidential candidates talk about over the next two years regarding health care, and whether they had confidence in each presidential candidate's ability to make decisions about health care. Information was also collected about the status of respondents and their household members' health care coverage and health care costs, their health status and treatment for common conditions, life expectancy, whether they had an employer-sponsored pension plan, and whether they were concerned about not having enough money for retirement. Additional information was collected on respondents' opinions of the Republican and Democratic parties, international trade, globalization, and the United States military situation with Iraq and Iran. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, education level, household income, marital status, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status and participation history, the presence of children under 18 and household members between the ages of 18 and 24, and whether respondents had children attending a four-year college.
description: The data contain a weight variable (WGHT) that should be used in analyzing the data. According the CBS News Web site, 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 phone with others have less chance to be contacted than people who live alone and have their own phones, and that households with more than one telephone number have more chances to be called than households with only one phone 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 
The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, New York.
The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it a unique identifier.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in the contiguous 48 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. 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).