Welcome to the North Carolina BRFSS
Internet Catalog of State and National Surveys

(Note: Although this catalog of surveys has been tailored to our North Carolina BRFSS partners, such as county health departments and state agencies who support the N.C. BRFSS Program, we hope that anyone interested in survey assessment, or looking for survey items of relevance to public health, will find this resource helpful. Access to all surveys in our catalog is quick and easy. Download the free Adobe Reader for viewing surveys.

Below you will find a listing of national (United States and Canada), state, and foundation-sponsored health-related surveys. This list is intended to serve as a library or database for viewing a wide range of survey items on topics of public health interest. Two principal criteria were used for selecting surveys for the list:

1. That the survey contain questions or modules potentially suitable for public health surveillance or for use in the BRFSS Survey, and
2. That the survey be available in PDF (Portable Document Format) files, easily accessible from the Web.

For each survey, we provide a brief description and commentary, suggesting areas of potential value to the BRFSS Survey or to public health surveillance. To help attribute value, each survey is rated according to its usefulness for finding questions that could be readily included in the N.C. BRFSS Survey or in surveys that comply with the BRFSS sampling procedures, where any adult household member (age 18+) is eligible for the survey. In many of the brief survey descriptions, you will also find selected questions (in italics) that have been excerpted, providing an example of the type and wording of questions found on the survey.

The survey rating system:

These surveys have a HIGH likelihood of finding questions suitable for the BRFSS. Here you will find surveys that contain the most questions of relevance to public health surveillance and questions that are easy to include in the BRFSS.

These surveys have a MODERATE likelihood of finding suitable questions. These surveys will require more searching to find topics or survey items of importance or relevance to the BRFSS and public health surveillance.

These surveys have a LOW likelihood of finding suitable questions. Primarily, these are surveys that employ different data collection methods or sampling schemes than those of the BRFSS Survey. For instance, in these LOW-likelihood surveys, the selected respondent may be the adult in the household most knowledgeable about the health of all family members. Survey questions based on this type of sampling procedure are less adaptable to the BRFSS questionnaire. Nonetheless, these surveys need to be in our catalog - and should not be overlooked.

About the Catalog
Currently, the catalog contains 31 surveys:

12 national surveys

 5 state surveys

 9 Kaiser Family Foundation surveys

 5 population-based clinical surveys