American Health Values Survey (AHVS) Series

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has a vision to build a Culture of Health (CoH) by making health a shared national priority, one valued and advanced by multiple stakeholders across all sectors of society. This vision embraces a very broadly integrated and comprehensive approach to health, one where well-being lies at the center of every aspect of American life. In 2014, the RWJF commissioned NORC at the University of Chicago to plan and conduct the first American Health Values Survey (AHVS) to understand the extent to which United States adults held views consistent with this vision. The idea was to explore which types of United States adults were more supportive and less supportive of the goal and what the differences were between the more and less supportive groups. To aid in the understanding of these differences, NORC developed a typology of United States adults based on their values and beliefs related to the CoH vision.

Using a large-scale national survey fielded in late 2015 and early 2016, NORC identified six major segments of the population of adults in the United States based on their differing health values and beliefs and developed detailed profiles of each segment that described their pattern of values and beliefs as well as their demographic, political and other characteristics. NORC subsequently replicated the typology development work in five RWJF Sentinel Communities across the nation and also developed a typology of rural America. The same segments, or similar ones, were common across various geographic areas of the United States. Four years have since passed, in which changes occurred in the country. RWJF in 2019 commissioned NORC to conduct a second national, cross-sectional survey (AHVS II) in late 2019 and early 2020.

The American Health Values Survey (AHVS) was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago in order to develop a typology of Americans based on their health values and beliefs. The survey, of more than 10,000 adults from five individual communities, examined values and beliefs related to health at both the individual as well as societal levels. The community surveys sought to compare differences between the local typologies, but also to investigate any similarities with national typology groups. The survey assessed the importance of health in:

• day-to-day personal life (i.e. the amount of effort spent on disease prevention as well as appropriate seeking of medical care);
• equity, the value placed on the opportunity to succeed generally in life as well as on health equity;
• social solidarity, the importance of taking into account the needs of others as well as personal needs;
• health care disparities, views about how easy/hard it is for African Americans, Latinos and low-income Americans to get quality health care;
• and, the importance of the social determinants of health.

In addition, the survey also explored views about how active government should be in health; collective efficacy, the ease of affecting positive community change by working with others; and health-related civic engagement e.g. the support of health charities and organizations working on health issues.

There are public-use and restricted-use versions of the data provided for each of the five sentinel communities participating in this study. Although each site differs on the number of respondents as listed below, each data file contains the same 143 variables for each site and version of the data. The only difference between the public-use versus restricted-use versions of the data is the variable ZIP, which was MASKED in the public-use version.

• DS1 and DS2 - Baltimore, Maryland: 2,139
• DS3 and DS4 - Maricopa County, Arizona: 2,247
• DS5 and DS6 - Stockton, California: 2,127
• DS7 and DS8 - Mobile, Alabama: 1,821
• DS9 and DS10 - North Central counties in Nebraska: 2,846