Preface

The 2011 Indiana Health Behavior Risk Factors Report provides a summary of the information collected from Indiana’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) throughout 2011. 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://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/brfss/).

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.

 

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