The 2008-2009 ANES Panel Study is a 21-month series of surveys of a representative sample of the American electorate. Panelists were recruited by telephone and began completing monthly surveys on the Internet in January 2008. The Panel Study will continue to collect data each month through September, 2009.

ADVANCE RELEASE
Initial data and documentation are now available for the 2008-2009 Panel. The purpose of this Advance Release is to allow users to examine relatively raw data as soon as possible after the election. The Advance Release comes with the strong caveats that quality control procedures have not been completed, the data are preliminary and are subject to revision, and the documentation is not complete. Expected changes include revisions to the weights, changes to the missing value codes, and re-computation of one or more summary variables. Users who prefer to work with data that have been subject to thorough quality control procedures, or who require more comprehensive documentation, or who require a full set of derived variables, should wait for the full release before completing their analyses.

SAMPLE AND DESIGN:
The 2008-2009 ANES Panel Study is a telephone-recruited Internet panel with two cohorts. The first cohort was recruited in late 2007 using random-digit-dialing (RDD) methods common to high-quality telephone surveys. Prospective respondents were offered $10 per month to complete surveys on the Internet for 30 minutes each month for 21 months, from January 2008 through September 2009. Those without a computer and Internet service were offered a free web appliance, MSNTV2, and free Internet service for the duration of the study. The second cohort was recruited the same way in the summer of 2008 and asked to join the panel beginning in September 2008.

To minimize panel attrition and conditioning effects, only 8 of the 21 monthly surveys will be entirely about politics. Other surveys are about a variety of non-political topics, using questions not written by ANES. The panelists answered political questions prepared by ANES in January, February, June, September, October, and November, 2008, and in May and July 2009. The panel also answered some political questions in January 2009 and will answer some additional political questions in August 2009.

For more information about the sample and study design, see the User's Guide.

STUDY CONTENT:
In 2007 the ANES Online Commons was open to proposals for Panel Study content from all members of the user community. Following the proposal period, an additional one-week comments period was open, during which opinions and remarks on the final set of submitted proposals continued to be accepted for consideration by the PIs and ANES Board as part of the decision-making process.

Finally, from November 21, 2007 to January 15, 2008, the 2008 ANES was open to proposals submitted in response to a special Terrorism and Homeland Security competition. Proposals on this topic, together with user-community commentary, were posted to the ANES Online Commons in a dedicated forum. Questions were evaluated for inclusion in either the 2008 ANES Time Series (primarily within a supplemental module) or for inclusion in the ANES 2008-2009 Panel. Questions selected from this competition and included as part of either ANES study are being funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

More than 80 proposals were received and considered as part of the study design process. Winning proposals shaped questionnaire content on numerous topics. The Panel Study includes batteries of questions on topics including turnout and candidate choice in the primaries and general election; attitudes toward candidates, parties, and groups; religion; interest in politics; efficacy; party identification; attitudes regarding policy issues; the Iraq war; the environment; the condition of the country; evaluations of George W. Bush; attitudes on race; social networks; and other topics. To leverage the panel design, many questions are repeated, with the same respondents answering at two or more points in time.

In addition to the 8 primarily political "ANES waves" of the study, the Panel Study includes questions for other waves that were written by outside investigators who funded the administration costs. More questions were selected from among batteries of questions that the data collection firm had used in their own past research, rounding out an additional 13 waves of primarily non-political content.

DATA RELEASE SCHEDULE:
The dataset and all accompanying documentation currently available for the 2008-2009 Panel Study are an Advance Release. The advance release data allow interested users to analyze political data collected so far, with the caveats that the advance release data are preliminary and are subject to revision and the documentation is not complete. Standard ANES data quality control procedures have not been completed with these data, so users should expect to find errors and inconsistencies in the data file.

If you identify any errors or inconsistencies, if you have questions, or if we can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us by email to: anes@electionstudies.org

In January 2010, ANES will post the full release of the Panel Study data and documentation to this website. The full release will include complete documentation and all public-use data from all 21 waves of the study: the 8 waves exclusively controlled by ANES and the 13 waves primarily controlled by the data collection firm.