Forces of Change Survey, United States, 2014, Restricted-Use Level 1 Data (ICPSR 36153)

Version Date: Nov 20, 2018

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Principal Investigator(s):
Sarah Newman, National Association of County & City Health Officials (U.S.)

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36153.v2

Version V2 ()

  • V2 [2018-11-20]
  • V1 [2016-02-29] unpublished
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Summary

The National Association of County and City Health Officials' (NACCHO) Forces of Change Survey is an evolution of NACCHO's Job Losses and Program Cuts Surveys (also known as the Economic Surveillance Surveys) which measured the impact of the economic recession on local health departments' (LHD) budgets, staff, and programs. The Forces of Change Survey continues to measure changes in LHD budgets, staff, and programs and assess more broadly the impact of forces affecting change in LHDs, such as health reform and accreditation. More specifically, the survey collected information about LHD staffing levels, workforce reductions, and changes in budget sizes; provided services or functions; changes in the level of service delivery; billing for clinical services; efforts to help people enroll in health insurance from exchanges under the Affordable Care Act; awareness of and involvement in the State Innovation Models Initiative; participation in the Public Health Accreditation Board's national accreditation program for LHDs; and whether LHDs are part of a combined health and human services agency.

The collection is comprised of the public-use version (Restricted-Use Level 1) of the Forces of Change 2014 dataset, and includes 133 variables for 648 cases, with demographic variables related to LHD budgets, governance type, and number of employees.

Citation

Newman, Sarah. Forces of Change Survey, United States, 2014, Restricted-Use Level 1 Data. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018-11-20. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36153.v2

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Funding

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (71723), United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1U38OT000172-01)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

State

Restrictions

Users must complete the Public-Use Data Agreement to access the Public-Use Version of the data. Please reference the user agreement included as part of this study's documentation for further information.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2014-01-23 -- 2014-02-28

Date of Collection

2014-01-23 -- 2014-02-28

Data Collection Notes

  1. Additional information about this study is available on the Forces of Change website.

  2. The restricted-use data (Restricted-Use Level 2) associated with the Forces of Change 2014 Study is available as ICPSR 37139.

  3. Additional Forces of Change studies related to this collection are available as ICPSR 37069 (2015 Restricted-Use Level 1), ICPSR 37140 (2015 Restricted-Use Level 2), ICPSR 37103 (2017 Restricted-Use Level 1), and ICPSR 37141 (2017 Restricted-Use Level 2).

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Study Purpose

The National Association of County and City Health Officials' (NACCHO) Forces of Change Survey was developed as an evolution to NACCHO's Job Losses and Program Cuts surveys, which measured the impact of the economic recession on local health departments' (LHD) budgets, staff, and programs. The Forces of Change Survey measured changes in LHD budgets, staff, and programs and assessed more broadly the impact of forces affecting change in LHDs (such as health reform). Beginning in 2014, NACCHO began conducting the Forces of Change survey yearly in years that the National Profile Study of Local Health Departments was not fielded.

Study Design

The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) administered the questionnaire using Qualtrics, an online survey administration tool. On January 15, 2014, the designated primary contact of every local health department (LHD) in the sample received an invitation via e-mail from NACCHO's president to participate in the survey. The survey link was sent via Qualtrics on January 23, 2014. After the initial invitation, the potential participants received up to five reminder e-mails. In addition, NACCHO made reminder calls to people who had yet to complete the survey, targeting states with low response rates. Some state associations of county and city health officials (SACCHOs) assisted by encouraging their members to take part in the survey.

NACCHO generated national statistics using estimation weights to account for sampling and non-response. All data were self-reported; NACCHO did not independently verify the data provided by LHDs. A detailed description of survey methodology is available on NACCHO's Forces of Change webpage.

Sample

The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) used a stratified random sampling design for the 2014 Forces of Change Survey. A representative sample was used instead of a complete census design to minimize survey burden on local health departments (LHD) while enabling the calculation of both national- and state-level estimates.

LHDs were stratified by two variables: state and size of the population served. For stratification by size of population served, three categories were used: small (less than 50,000 people served), medium (50,000-499,999 people served), and large (500,000 or more people served). Because LHDs with large population sizes represent a relatively small portion of all LHDs, these LHDs were oversampled to ensure a sufficient number of responses for the analysis. Two states (Hawaii and Rhode Island) were excluded from the study because they had no LHDs. In addition, some states did not have any LHDs in a particular size category, resulting in a total of 122 strata. The sampling plan was designed to select a minimum of 33 percent of the LHDs in a given stratum and at least two LHDs per stratum whenever possible.

Once the sampling plan was finalized, NACCHO drew a random sample of the specified size from within each stratum. In some centralized states, two or more LHDs had the same person listed as the contact person. To minimize response burden, no more than two LHDs with the same contact person were kept in the sample. However, two contacts in Alabama received three surveys each because additional contacts in their state were not available. When LHDs with a common contact person were dropped from sample, or when contact information was not available, a replacement was drawn. Overall, a sample of 952 LHDs was selected of which 648 responded to the survey.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Local health departments (LHD) in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Hawaii and Rhode Island were excluded from the survey because they had no LHDs.

Unit(s) of Observation

Local Health Departments

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Description of Variables

Variables are related to questionnaire topics, including budget cuts and job losses, changes in service delivery, and local health departments' collaboration with healthcare.

Response Rates

68 percent

Presence of Common Scales

Several Likert-type scales were used.

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Original Release Date

2016-02-29

Version History

2018-11-20 The Forces of Change Survey, United States, 2014 Study was updated by separating data and documentation into two separate study numbers: public-use (ICPSR 36153) and restricted-use (ICPSR 37139).

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Newman, Sarah. Forces of Change Survey, United States, 2014, Restricted-Use Level 1 Data. ICPSR36153-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018-11-20. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36153.v2

2016-02-29 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
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Weight

A weight variable (WEIGHT) has been included and must be used in any analysis.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.