The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) is pleased to announce that we are conducting our fifth County-level Study (CLS). Beginning in early January 2022 and extending through December 2022, randomly selected Missouri adults will be invited to participate in the study. When data collection ends, approximately 50,000 Missouri residents will have answered questions on a variety of health-related topics (e.g., health status, access to care, health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, preventive health practices, etc.) The 2022 CLS expands on data previously collected from studies conducted in 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2016. New topics include questions about the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., vaccination, economic impact, long-term COVID effects, etc.) and opioid use.
To be eligible to participate, you must be 18 years of age or older, a resident of Missouri, live in a private residence, such as a house or apartment, or in college housing. The study will be conducted by telephone, so you must have a cell phone or landline. Participation is voluntary and respondents can refuse to answer any question.
A few respondents are reluctant to answer the question on county of residence. Without this information, your responses cannot be included when data are analyzed to produce county-level prevalence estimates for such things as health status (e.g., Would you say that in general your health is excellent, very good, good, fair or poor?”) and behaviors that affect a person’s health. Such behaviors may be risky (e.g., “Considering all types of alcoholic beverages, how many times during the past 30 days did you have 5 or more drinks (4 or more if respondent is female) on an occasion?” [Asked of respondents who said they had at least one drink of an alcoholic beverage in the past 30 days] or preventive (e.g., “During the past 12 months, have you had either a flu vaccine that was sprayed in your nose or a flu shot injected into your arm?”).
The 2022 CLS will produce prevalence estimates for all 114 Missouri counties and the City of St. Louis. A minimum of 300 interviews will be conducted in most counties. A greater number of interviews will be conducted in selected counties (e.g., Boone, Buchanan, Clay, Cole, Greene, Jackson, Jasper, St. Charles St. Louis and the City of St. Louis) so that comparisons of health status and health-related behaviors by race/ethnicity and rural/urban residence can be made.
As with the four earlier studies, the study is being conducted in collaboration with the University of MissouriColumbia (MU) Health and Behavioral Risk Research Center (HBRRC), a component of the MU School of Medicine Department of Health Management and Informatics (HMI). Trained interviewers from HBRRC, using a computerassisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system will call random-digit-dialed (RDD) telephone numbers seven days a week. Weekday calls occur between 9 am and 9 pm while weekend calls begin later and end earlier.
Procedures used to conduct the study closely follow procedures used by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/index.html.
Following completion of data collection and analysis of the data, 2022 CLS data will be available through the DHSS Community Data Profiles website. Previous CLS data are available at https://healthapps.dhss.mo.gov/MoPhims/ProfileBuilder?pc=14. For more information about the 2022 CLS or earlier studies, contact Anthony Belenchia at Anthony.Belenchia@health.mo.gov.