Household Survey: Instrument Development and Methodology

This session will describe the problems of aggregate data at county level, the advantages of local level data collection, and the methods and results of the Delaware Cancer Disparities Neighborhood Survey.

The work of current researchers on the socioeconomic determinants of health disparities posit that poverty, lack of education, and limited English proficiency all contribute to poor health outcomes. The Public Health Geo-coding Project, at the School of Public Health at Harvard University has pioneered the analysis of socio-economic gradients across census blocks and tracts.

Based on these findings, three census tracts were selected using the criteria of the largest number of both African Americans and Latinos living in poverty, Spanish-speaking individuals living in linguistic isolation, and the highest numbers of individuals who have 9th grade education or less as found in the database for the 2000 US Census.

The sampling design of this community survey was led by Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Linda Owens, from the Survey Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois. The Survey Research Laboratory designed the Sinai Urban Health Institute 2006 study sampling strategy. The methodology selected for this survey was a three-stage probability, random selection design.

This research used 20 trained community members as surveyors who completed 150 surveys over a one month period of time, despite untoward weather conditions. The lessons learned from this approach are many and as important as the research findings. Both will be shared in detail. Survey materials will be available to participants.