ABC News Church in Crisis Poll, 2002

DOI

10.17605/OSF.IO/8QHFA

Citation

Langer, G. E. (2020, August 13). ABC News Church in Crisis Poll, 2002.

Summary

In this March 2002 ABC News/Washington Post/Beliefnet survey, a random national sample of 1,086 Americans was asked about their views on the Catholic Church and how the church has handled the issue of priests and child sexual abuse. Questions for respondents included: whether they felt the Catholic Church was in crisis, their satisfaction with the leadership of the church, should priests be allowed to marry, should the church allow for women priests, the impact of the sexual abuse scandal on the reputation of the church, and their awareness of abuse in their own church or parish. Demographic variables include: gender, age, race, and education.

The ARDA has added five additional variables to the original data set to enhance the users' experience on our site.

Data File

Cases: 1086
Variables: 75
Weight Variable: FNLWGT

Data Collection

March 25-28, 2002

Funded By

ABC News, Gary E. Langer, Director of Polling

Collection Procedures

This survey was conducted by TNS Intersearch of Horsham, Pa., for ABC News. Telephone interviews were done with a random national sample of 1,086 adults. Catholics (503) were oversampled in the survey.

Sampling Procedures

As described on the Methodology page of the ABC News Web site, "A sample of households in the continental United States is selected via random digit dialing (RDD) procedures, to ensure that all possible listed and unlisted phone numbers are included with equal probability of selection.

"Sampling then occurs in three stages. First, a systematic random sample of telephone exchanges is selected within each stratum, by taking every nth exchange. ... Next, telephone banks (the first two digits of the four-digit suffix) with more than one residential listing assigned in white pages directories are classified as working banks. ... The third stage of sampling is respondent selection within the household, accomplished by last-birthday selection. Interviewers ask to speak to the household member age 18 or over at home who's had the last birthday. ..." Please see the Methodology Web page listed above for a full description of the sampling procedures used in this survey.

Principal Investigators

Gary E. Langer, Director of Polling, ABC News

Related Publications

For more information about this survey
https://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/879a2%20Church%20in%20Crisis.pdf

According to the Methodology page of the ABC News Web site, "Final data are weighted using demographic information from the Census to adjust for sampling and nonsampling deviations from population values. Respondents customarily are classified into one of 48 cells based on age, race, sex and education. Weights are assigned so the proportion in each of these 48 cells matches the actual population proportion according to the Census Bureau's most recent Current Population Survey."