Preface
The 2014 Indiana Health Behavior Risk Factors Report
provides a summary of the information collected from Indiana’s Behavioral Risk
Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) throughout 2014. The survey collects data
from Indiana residents on various modifiable health risks, preventive health
measures, and demographic variables. The objective of this report is to
encourage change in risk-related health behaviors, discover target populations
for programs and resources, and present the condition of Indiana’s health in a
way that can be compared to the health risk behaviors of the rest of the United
States.
This report is intended for
health professionals, students, legislators, and others interested in the
health status of the Indiana community.
The Indiana State Department
of Health gratefully acknowledges the efforts of the residents of the State of
Indiana who took the time to respond to the questions asked in the telephone
interviews conducted for this survey. A special acknowledgment is
also extended to the staff of Clearwater Research, Inc., who committed
themselves to collecting these BRFSS data in an accurate and professional
manner.
Notes:
This year, the
"Unk/Ref" category (that indicates that the respondent declined to
answer the question or was uncertain of the correct response) was omitted from
the tables. While it may be useful to examine this category for certain
questions, restricting the report solely to those respondents who provided a
response allows a direct comparison with the prevalence and trends data that
CDC provides for Indiana
(http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/brfssprevalence/index.html).
The racial/ethnicity groupings are those provided by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC); Black is understood to mean Black or African
American. Other demographic groupings are either conventional or provide
useful classifications for Indiana respondents.
For reporting of the two
child asthma variables, the child's racial classification was constructed from a
combination of the bridged race and the racial variables, grouping the data
into three groups: white, black, and other.
Ethnicity, sex, and age of the children were available from data in the file.