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About Eagleton Poll Archive

Welcome to the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll Archive. This interactive website provides access to the survey data and questionnaires from the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling's statewide public opinion polls of New Jersey residents’ attitudes on political and social matters. On the site, you can view questionnaires and response data from 1971 through today. You may search on keywords or browse through topics and questionnaires.

Polls are typically released on this site about one year after they are conducted.

The Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics has been conducting regular polling in New Jersey since 1971. It is the oldest university-based statewide polling operation in the country. From 1983 to 2005, Eagleton conducted surveys in partnership with the Star-Ledger, the state's largest newspaper, under the banner of the Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers Poll. The survey is now known as the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll to reflect ongoing financial support from the University.

ECPIP contributes to the public dialogue by surveying and interpreting the opinions of citizens on major policy concerns and key state issues and political races. Its key mission is to provide high-quality non-partisan information about public opinion in New Jersey. In addition to conducting the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, ECPIP assists government agencies, non-profit organizations, and academic entities with research services.

These polls provide an incredibly rich resource for understanding New Jersey and its citizens. The polls are intended for use not only by researchers and those involved with public policy, but also by the general public.

The complete poll questionnaires and survey results are available at this site. In addition, a user can search the website for specific topics. All questionnaires are completely indexed, so the result of a search will return any questions that contain the specific search term. A user can then select the "frequency" or "cross-tab" functions to view results for that particular question. In addition, a barchart or piechart can be selected to view the frequency results graphically. A browse mode enables one to browse by subject, poll date, and time-series.

For researchers who want to do their own analysis, the full questionnaires and data files in SPSS portable format can be downloaded from this website. For those using the data files, it should be noted that a weighting variable appears in the raw data. Weighting is a statistical technique used to adjust for differences between the demographic profile of the survey sample and that of the full population. For the general user of this website, these weights have been automatically applied to the survey results.

When including results from this website in a publication, the data should be properly cited as follows:

Center for Public Interest Polling/Eagleton Poll, Poll #5, question #34, January, 1973. At: http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu

This website was designed by a team from the Center for Public Interest Polling/Eagleton Institute and the Scholarly Communication Center of Rutgers University Libraries. Funding for this project was provided by Fund for New Jersey and a Rutgers University Strategic Resource and Opportunity Analysis grant.

For any further questions about the poll or the polling data in this archive, please contact poll@eagleton.rutgers.edu.