From the course: Descriptive Healthcare Analytics in R

More on the BRFSS - R Tutorial

From the course: Descriptive Healthcare Analytics in R

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More on the BRFSS

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- [Instructor] Welcome to chapter one, section three, where I cover more information about the BRFSS. First, I'm going to review the availability of the BRFSS data and the also the accompanying documentation. I'm also going to review the update schedule of the data. In the bad old days before the internet, it was really hard to share the BRFSS data. This was only for technological reasons. Remember, data collectors are calling randomly generated phone numbers, and no personally identifying information is asked, so this is already a very anonymous data set. But the large amount of data and the resources needed to understand it were hard to transfer in the past, and this has all been solved through the internet. Nowadays, the CDC makes these yearly data sets along with documentation easily available, and this presents many opportunities. These data represent your tax money at work. There is a lot of work involved in collecting these data. So, of course, it is best if we can promote the use of these data in analyses that are not already completed by the CDC and the state health departments. This chapter will go more deeply later into why an independent researcher would want to download these data and use them in an analysis. So as a reminder of the two types of data available, the main two public health surveillance efforts in the U.S. are the NHANES, which includes clinical measurements, and the the BRFSS, which is an anonymous phone survey that represents a federal and state collaboration. The data and documentation from the BRFSS are publicly available and are useful to the CDC and the states for program planning. But they are also useful to you, the researcher. The next section will focus on how independent researchers can use BRFSS data, as they go about their scientific work.

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