Additional Information for Selected Variables
Many of the variables are relatively straightforward, but some types of variables require more thorough explanation. This is provided below.
There are several feeling thermometer items (A08, A09, D13-D16, P05-P10), which asked the respondent to indicate his or her feeling toward a specific candidate or party by placing that person or party on a feeling thermometer that ranges from 0 to 100 degrees, where 50 degrees represents a neutral feeling, higher temperatures represent warmer or more positive feelings, and lower temperatures represent cooler or more negative feelings. Placements on the feeling thermometers have been collapsed into five categories for ease of analysis.
There are a number of issue-position scales, each of which has a seven-point scale that represents possible positions people might take on a specific issue. For example, there is an issue-position scale on government services and spending (J01). The possible positions on the scale run from "provide many fewer services to reduce spending a lot" to "provide many more services, even if it means increased spending." Respondents were asked to place themselves on this scale according to their feelings on the issue. Only the end points of the seven-point scale are defined. Respondents who feel that they fall between the two extremes can place themselves on one of the middle points. All of the issue-position scales have this basic structure.
There are candidate-placement scales that indicate how the respondents felt that Obama or Romney stood on the issues. They are similar in structure to the issue-position scales to which they correspond. For example, respondents were asked where they thought Obama and Romney stood on the health insurance plan scale. These two candidate-placement scales (J08, J09) have seven possible categories, running from "Government health plan" to "Private health plans," just like the issue-position scale for health insurance plans (J01). The difference is that V087 measures where the respondent falls on this scale, whereas J08 and J09 measure where the respondent thinks that Obama and Romney fall on the scale. The usefulness of the candidate placement scales is that by using them in combination with the item that measures the respondent's position, one can see how closely the respondent felt he or she was to each of the two major candidates on the respective issue.
There are several indices that summarize how a respondent answered two or more questions that are related to a single topic. For example, the political efficacy index (P02) is based on how the respondent answered two questions dealing with feelings about the ability of people to influence government. Respondents in the "high" category generally answered the questions in a very "positive" or "efficacious" manner. Respondents in the "low" category generally gave very inefficacious responses, and those in between gave mixed responses. Other indices include K17, K18, P03 and P04. These indices were constructed because each better measures the underlying concept than does any one of the specific questions that were used to construct the index. Note: it is possible for you to construct additional indices by using the recoding program in SDA.
There are a few variables in the codebook (and the data) for which results have not yet been released by the American National Election Study (A05, A06, R07, R10 and R21). For these data, the marginals indicate all cases have a value of "0". We have included those variables here because we fully expect that the data will be released fairly soon. When the data are released we will make them available both in the SDA data file and in the codebook.