Introduction to the Special Issue of Articles from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health

Abstract

Children’s health and well-being can be measured using a variety of metrics. Very often these measures are drawn from data systems which provide primarily national estimates of domain-specific indicators. The National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) is unique among these systems in that it collects information on a comprehensive set of physical, mental and social health indicators among children, their access to and utilization of health services as well as family and community level factors that have been shown to influence health and development. The survey is designed to provide both nationaland state-level estimates which are necessary for the development, implementation, and monitoring of effective health promotion and disease prevention programs for children and their families. As such, the NSCH fills a critical void and is the only data system that provides comparable estimates of children’s health from birth to age 17 across every state in the nation. Reflecting a sustained commitment on the part of the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the 2007 NSCH is the second such effort, building on the success of the first NSCH in 2003 to collect accurate and timely information on the health and wellbeing of children and their families with a third round of the NSCH (2011) soon to be publicly available. The 2007 NSCH not only provides updated estimates of child health at both national and state levels but, coupled with the 2003 NSCH, also provides the capacity to evaluate national, regional, and state trends as well as the impact of federal and state-level programs and policies. The 2007 NSCH was fielded between April 2007 and July 2008 yielding 91,642 completed child-level interviews across the United States including 1,700–1,900 interviews in each State. Consistent with the original NSCH in 2003, the survey was conducted as a module of the State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey Program (SLAITS) which utilizes the sampling frame of the National Immunization Survey (NIS). The NIS is a random-digit dial telephone survey that uses computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) technology to contact and interview households. In order to identify eligible subjects, households were screened for the presence of a child under the age of 18 years; if more than one child resided in the household, one was randomly selected to be the subject of the interview. Respondents were adults knowledgeable about the child’s health. In nearly three-quarters of interviews this was the child’s mother while 20.5 % of the remaining interviews were conducted with the child’s father, 4.2 % were conducted with a grandparent and 1.8 % with other relatives or guardians. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Overall, 5.3 % of interviews were conducted in Spanish and 0.2 % were conducted in one of the four Asian languages [1]. The overall response rate was 51.2 % and the interview completion rate was 66.0 % for all households with children [2]. Similar to the 2003 survey, the 2007 NSCH contained ‘‘core’’ survey items in several domains, including: health and functional status, health care financing, access and The views in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Health Resources and Services Administration of the US Department of Health and Human Services.