Martina Reynolds

HS 328

16 September 2022

Friday Folder #2

Surveillance system of choice: National Survey of Children’s Health

1. Who are the respondents?: non-institutionalized children from the ages of 0-17

(submitted by their guardian)

What is measured? What is the purpose?:  Physical and emotional health; factors that

may relate to well-being of children, including medical home, family interactions,

parental health, school experiences, and safe neighborhoods. The purpose is to create a

massive set of data that parents or anyone who studies children’s health can refer to.

How is the survey administered?: Randomly selected households are mailed an

invitation to complete an online questionnaire (there are 3 different age group categories,

both offered in English and Spanish, to choose from) and if they did not complete the

survey online after several reminders in the mail, they were mailed a physical copy of the

questionnaire.

Where is the data collected from?: Randomly selected from across all 50 US states.

What sort of questions are asked? Do any surprise you? Discuss: The questions start

out with asking about the demographic information for the child—i.e., sex, age, ethnicity.

They also ask many questions about medical history—access to medical care,

medications, diseases, etc. The survey later asks questions regarding what benchmark

skills the child possesses such as ability to rhyme, knowing the alphabet, distractibility,
 etc. It also asks about social interactions with peers but the modern version of this survey

has been updated to include interactions with peers on social media. There is a final

section of the survey asking the parent/guarding specifically about their own habits as a

parent and what the household is like.

I was surprised by questions that I think would be very hard for a parent to recall.

An example of this was in the section that asked about the breastfeeding history of the

child and it asked what age they were when they weaned from breastmilk and asks what

age they were first fed formula and first fed anything other than breastmilk or formula. I

understand why they ask these questions, but I think that it shows that some of the

information given in the data from this survey is based on the best guesses of parents. It

would be important for someone who is viewing the data to keep that in mind.

2. I thought that the bullying data for Idaho was a really interesting (and upsetting) thing to

look at. There are only 5 states that have a higher occurrence of bullying than us. About

50% of the children in Idaho have experienced bullying.

3. This type of data will be critical to me in my desired career. I’m working on being a

health educator and data such as what I found in the National Survey of Children’s

Health gives me more insight into a multitude of factors that all contribute to a child’s

health. It serves as a reminder that each student has had a myriad of life experiences that

have got them to where they are before they walk into my classroom and that it is always

important to be sensitive to the differences that they have between them. Obviously

surveillance systems such as YRBSS, PRAMS, and PRATS all would be useful to me as

well, but I wanted to highlight that this one is important in education as well because of

the focus on background and contributing factors.

4. I think some further exploration would be interesting if I could look at some data that

overlaps some of these surveillance system findings. For example, how does growing up

without adequate health care in the infancy years overlap with risks in the teen years, or

similar questions.