PRRI 2012 American Values Survey, Pre-Election

DOI

10.17605/OSF.IO/TKX63

Citation

Jones, R. P., & Cox, D. (2021, November 18). PRRI 2012 American Values Survey, Pre-Election.

Summary

The American Values Survey (AVS) is Public Religion Research Institute's annual multi-issue survey on religion, values and public policy. The survey is conducted each fall, and on election years includes both a pre-election and post-election survey.

The 2012 Pre-Election Survey focused heavily on religious change in America and the 2012 presidential election. The survey included questions that measured current and childhood religious affiliation. Questions covered a variety of topics including attitudes toward political leaders, and views about abortion, same-sex marriage the contraception mandate and immigration.

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

Data File

Cases: 3003
Variables: 92
Weight Variable: WEIGHT

The weighting was accomplished in two stages. The first stage of weighting corrected for different probabilities of selection associated with the number of adults in each household and each respondent's telephone usage patterns. In the second stage, sample demographics were balanced by form to match target population parameters for gender, age, education, race and Hispanic ethnicity, region (U.S. Census definitions), population density and telephone usage. The population density parameter was derived from Census 2000 data. The telephone usage parameter came from an analysis of the July-December 2010 National Health Interview Survey. All other weighting parameters were derived from an analysis of the Census Bureau's 2010 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) data.

Data Collection

Sept. 13-30, 2012

Original Survey (Instrument)

American Values Survey, Pre-election 2012

Funded By

The Ford Foundation
The Nathan Cummings Foundation

Collection Procedures

Results of the survey were based on bilingual (Spanish and English) telephone interviews conducted between Sept. 13-30, 2012 by professional interviewers under the supervision of Directions in Research. Interviews were conducted by telephone among a random sample of 3,003 adults 18 years of age or older in the continental United States (1,201 respondents were interviewed on a cell phone). The landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International and the final sample was weighted to ensure proper representativeness.

Sampling Procedures

The sample weighting was accomplished using Sample Balancing, a special iterative sample - weighting program that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis ensures that the demographic characteristics of the sample closely approximate the demographic characteristics of the target populations.

Principal Investigators

Robert P. Jones
Daniel Cox

Related Publications

The following link contains a summary of the Public Religion Research Institute's findings of this survey:

https://www.prri.org/research/american-values-survey-2012/