NATIONAL SURVEY

The data sets used throughout most of this book are part of the Perceptions of Congress project funded by the National Science Foundation. The telephone-survey data were collected by the Bureau of Sociological Research at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The bureau hired and trained interviewers for this project. The bureau purchased a list of telephone numbers from a national random sample and then randomly generated the last digit of the telephone number. When interviewers called a household, they asked to speak to the person in the household who was at least 18 years old and who had had the most recent birthday (Salmon & Nichols, 1983). The telephone interviews were conducted from July to October 1992 and had a 57 percent response rate. A total of 1,433 people completed the survey.

The survey items and scales used in the regression analyses in Chapters 6 and 7 were standardized to range from o to 1, making comparisons across variables easier. See King (1986) and Luskin (1991) for a discussion of how to interpret scales using this method of standardizing variables.

Demographics

Education: What is the highest level of education you have completed? 1 = less than high school; 2 = some high school; 3 = high school graduate; 4 = some technical school; 5 = technical school graduate; 6 = some college; 7 = college graduate; 8 = postgraduate or professional degree.