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The Chicago Surveys are part of a long-running series of public opinion surveys conducted by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs every two years. This study is the 2012 Chicago Council Survey, designed to investigate the opinions and attitudes of the general public on matters related to foreign policy, and to define the parameters of public opinion within which decision-makers must operate.

The 2012 Chicago Council Survey focuses on respondents' opinions of the United States' leadership role in the world and the challenges the country faces domestically and internationally.

The survey covers the following international topics: relations with other countries, role in foreign affairs, possible threats to vital interests in the next ten years, foreign policy goals, benefits or drawbacks of globalization, situations that might justify the use of United States troops in other parts of the world, the number and location of United States military bases overseas, respondent feelings toward people of other countries, opinions on the influence of other countries in the world and how much influence those countries should have, United States participation in potential treaties, the United States' role in the United Nations and NATO, which side the United States should take in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what measures should be taken to deal with Iran's nuclear program, the military effort in Afghanistan, opinions on efforts to combat terrorism, and the rise of China as a global power.

Domestic issues include economic prospects for American children when they become adults, funding for government programs, the fairness of the current distribution of income in the United States, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and United States dependence on foreign energy sources.

Demographic and other background information include age, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, left-right political self-placement, political affiliation, employment status, highest level of education, and religious preference. Also included are household size and composition, whether the respondent is head of household, household income, housing type, ownership status of living quarters, household Internet access, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) status, and region and state of residence.

The Detroit Arab American Study (DAAS), 2003, a companion survey to the 2003 Detroit Area Study (DAS), using a representative sample (DAS, n = 500) drawn from the three-county Detroit metropolitan area and an oversample of Arab Americans (DAAS, n = 1000) from the same region, provides a unique dataset on September 11, 2001, and its impacts on Arab Americans living in the Detroit metropolitan area. The data contain respondent information concerning opinions on their experiences since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, social trust, confidence in institutions, intercultural relationships, local social capital, attachments to transnational communities, respondent characteristics, and community needs. Examples of the issues addressed in the data include frequency of religious participation, level of political activism, level of interaction with people outside of their cultural, racial, and ethnic groups, and the quality of the social and political institutions in their area. Background information includes birth country, citizenship status, citizenship status of spouse, education, home ownership status, household income, language spoken in the home (if not English), marital status, number of children (under 18) in the household, parents' countries of birth and citizenship status, political affiliation, total number of people living in the household, voter registration status, whether the respondent ever served in the United States Armed Forces, and year of immigration, if not born in the United States.

The article uses several statistical techniques to identify and analyze phases in an event dataset measuring the political behavior among eight Middle Eastern actors -- Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria, the United States, and USSR/Russia -- for the period July 1979 to June 1995. Consistent with narrative accounts, factor analysis identifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Lebanon as the two most important features of the data. Other factors reflect inter-Arab and major-power relationships. Discriminant analysis can distinguish a set of human-coded phases with about 90 percent accuracy. Stepwise discriminant achieves 70 percent accuracy using data from only 12 of the 54 directed dyads. Finally, K-means cluster analysis identifies five distinct phases that align fairly well with the human-coded phases, particularly in the first half of the time period. The dataset consists of WEIS-coded events generated from Reuters lead sentences downloaded from the NEXIS data service, then coded using the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) machine coding system. One file provides the raw event data (approximately 110,000 events). A second tab-delimited file aggregates these events into dyad-months using the Goldstein (1992) scaling. The KEDS coding dictionaries and the program used to generate the data are also included in the ICPSR Publication-Related Archive release. Additional information can be obtained from the World Wide Web at http://www.ukans.edu/~keds.