On ABC’s “This Week” program today, anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Cardinal Timothy Dolan about our ABC News/Washington Post poll finding that six in 10 American Catholics think the church is out of touch with their views. “Sometimes, by nature, the church has got to be out of touch with concerns, because we’re always supposed to be thinking of the beyond, the eternal, the changeless,” the cardinal replied, adding, “… sometimes there is a disconnect. … And that’s a challenge for us.” See ABC’s coverage of the interview here, and our poll report here. Beyond ABC and the Post, the poll’s been widely reported on outlets including CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, Agence France-Presse, the Huffington Post, Canada Free Press and as far afield as ABC-CBN News in the Philippines.

Our ABC News/Washington Post poll on gay marriage this week was cited in the Obama administration’s reply brief on the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as being reported by news outlets including MSNBC, NPR, the Huffington Post, The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Economist, the LA Times, The Boston Globe, the Atlantic, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Slate, Politico, the National Journal, The Hill, The New York Post, New York Magazine, the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Detroit Free Press, The Nation, The New York Times, PBS Newshour, NBC News, Newsday, Glamour and (king of them all) the Winnipeg Free Press.

Health Affairs has published a piece by Peter Long, president of Blue Shield of California Foundation, on our ongoing research for the Foundation among long-income Californians on patient engagement and primary care redesign. The same work was cited last month in testimony by Mark Blum, Chief Executive Officer, America’s Agenda Healthcare Education Fund, to the California State Assembly Committee on Health. And Gary Langer gave a presentation on the research Feb. 25 at a roundtable meeting at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C.; see the video link here.

There’s been wide pickup by other media organizations of our ongoing ABC News/Washington Post polls. Recent examples include coverage of our last poll on the president’s personal favorability in the Seattle PI; on gun control in the San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, UPI, the National Journal, Slate and Concord Monitor; on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the Baltimore Sun, The Hill, onMSNBC and on Real Clear Politics; on immigration policy in the Huffington Post; on the president’s inauguration in U.S. News and World Reportand the National Journal; and on the recent budget deal in The American Prospect and the Huffington Post.

Counterpart International, a global development nonprofit, has released our survey-based assessment of Support to the Electoral Process (STEP), a civic engagement program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development in which Counterpart and its local partners instructed more than 3.3 million Afghan citizens in the principles of democracy, civil rights, the rule of law and the structure of government.

The report includes an extensive analysis of STEP’s impacts, based on statistical analysis of covariance structure in survey samples of treatment and non-treatment groups in 12 Afghan provinces. If finds that the STEP program had a significant, positive effect on participants’ civic orientation and political and community involvement. The quality of the training sessions, including ratings of teaching materials, topics, instructors and teaching strategies, was a key predictor of successful results, along with security and development levels in the locales in which STEP programs were held.

Findings of the study are contextualized through a detailed review of the literature on best practices in civic education, and the report includes recommendations on how to achieve the maximum positive impact of future civic engagement programs.

Langer Research Associates conducted the literature review, designed the survey questionnaire, analyzed the data and wrote the Counterpart-STEP report, as well as co-designing the sampling plan with D3 Systems Inc., which managed data collection and processing via the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research (ACSOR) in Kabul.

See the study here on Counterpart International’s website.

The Daily, a new national news outlet for tablets and other digital platforms, has posted a nicely produced report on our take on the 2012 election. See it here. (Addendum: The Daily has added a new, post-election piece examining President Obama’s victory, here.)

With international interest in the presidential election running high, we’ve done interviews in the past week with BBC television; French radio network Europe 1; RTE, Ireland’s national public radio broadcaster; and Dublin-based Newstalk Radio Ireland.

Gary Langer today gave an invited presentation, “Probability Sampling and Alternative Methodologies,” at the National Science Foundation’s Conference on the Future of Survey Research, in Arlington, Va. Gary also has presented recently at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and to several business groups seeking insight into the 2012 presidential election.

Gary Langer has appeared twice recently on Public Radio International’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney, today on politics and the economy and last week on strategy in the presidential campaign. Separately, Esquire magazine and Yahoo! News today released additional resultsof the national political survey produced for them by Langer Research Associates; and our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll on views of the Obama and Romney campaigns was picked up this week by Politico and the Huffington Post, among others.

DRI-The Voice of the Defense Bar, the nation’s leading association of civil defense lawyers, today released a random-sample national public opinion poll produced by Langer Research Associates on attitudes toward the U.S. system of civil jurisprudence. The results include self-assessments of potentially biased views of litigants, measures of public confidence in the civil law system and attitudes about class-action lawsuits, including personal experience with such cases. The survey finds broad preference for lawsuits to be tried by jury, buttressed by overwhelming acceptance among Americans of jury duty as a civic obligation. See the news release and full report here. The survey’s been reported by Legal Times.

Check here for the latest from our national political poll for Esquire and Yahoo! News. (Details below.) Great graphics!