American Health Values Survey (AHVS): Sentinel Communities Segmentation, 5 American communities, 2016-2017

The American Health Values Survey (AHVS) was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago in order to develop a typology of Americans based on their health values and beliefs. The survey, of more than 10,000 adults from five individual communities, examined values and beliefs related to health at both the individual as well as societal levels. The community surveys sought to compare differences between the local typologies, but also to investigate any similarities with national typology groups. The survey assessed the importance of health in:

day-to-day personal life (i.e. the amount of effort spent on disease prevention as well as appropriate seeking of medical care);
equity, the value placed on the opportunity to succeed generally in life as well as on health equity;
social solidarity, the importance of taking into account the needs of others as well as personal needs;
health care disparities, views about how easy/hard it is for African Americans, Latinos and low-income Americans to get quality health care;
and, the importance of the social determinants of health.

In addition, the survey also explored views about how active government should be in health; collective efficacy, the ease of affecting positive community change by working with others; and health-related civic engagement e.g. the support of health charities and organizations working on health issues.
There are public-use and restricted-use versions of the data provided for each of the five sentinel communities participating in this study. Although each site differs on the number of respondents as listed below, each data file contains the same 143 variables for each site and version of the data. The only difference between the public-use versus restricted-use versions of the data is the variable <strong>ZIP</strong>, which was MASKED in the public-use version.

DS1 and DS2 - Baltimore, Maryland: 2,139
DS3 and DS4 - Maricopa County, Arizona: 2,247
DS5 and DS6 - Stockton, California: 2,127
DS7 and DS8 - Mobile, Alabama: 1,821
DS9 and DS10 - North Central counties in Nebraska: 2,846