Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System

Intro and Overview

The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is a large scale annual telephone survey about health related behaviors, chronic conditions, and preventive healthcare. The BRFSS began in 1984 but only 15 states were participating. Over time, the survey has grown to include all 50 states, Washington D.C. and US territories. The BRFSS is very large - it includes 400,000 adult interviews per year, but the survey content varies over time and not all states field all modules. Careful attention should be paid to the codebook counts for complete responses when planning a BRFSS data project. Nonetheless, the BRFSS is the only option for health survey data with state identifiers available in the public use file and some years include geocode to identify smaller geographes, too. BRFSS also has a Selected Metropolitan/Micropolitan Area Risk Trends (SMART) data product that allow you to examine health information for a selection of smaller geographical areas, but do not provide microdata on individuals.

Tips for Getting Started

Key Advantages

State identifiers are available on the public use data.
Health behaviors, preventive health, and chronic disease information is relatively consistent across survey years.
Relatively easy to use for a first time project

Key Disadvantages

Cross-sectional
No harmonized version spanning multiple years - you must harmonize yourself

Papers Using these Data

A full bibliography is available here. Links to an external site.

People to Contact During Office Hours

Mary Hamman