The content of the 1996 Election Study reflects its dual function, both as the traditional presidential election year time-series data collection and as a panel study. Other new items included several measures of social connectedness and a battery of items on membership and activity in a wide variety of social, political, religious, and civic organizations. New media exposure, reception, and attention items were also introduced, including questions on talk radio, network and television news, and items asking respondents to match news anchors with the networks they work for. They are based on multistage representative cross-section samples of citizens of voting age, living in private households. Each study contains information from interviews conducted with 1,000 to 2,000 respondents.
Interviews range from one to three hours in length.
Many questions are replicated across studies, although each has questions not asked in the others. National Science Foundation. The revised version of the data file includes corrections to one case that had incorrect data in a number of 1994-related variables and another case that had incorrect respondent gender. Some of these codes were inadvertently omitted from the earlier version of this collection.