The Associated Press-AOL Health poll on debt and stress was conducted March 24 to April 3, 2008 by Abt SRBI Inc. The poll is based on telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,002 adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii, including 778 adults with credit cards and 931 adults with debt.

Digits in the phone numbers dialed were generated randomly to reach households with unlisted and listed landline numbers.

Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.

As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population’s makeup by demographic factors such as age, sex, education, region and race.

No more than one time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.1 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all people in the U.S. were polled. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for credit card holders and plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for those with debt.

There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.

The questions and results for this poll are available at http://surveys.ap.org.