Community Health Survey

The New York City Community Health Survey (CHS) is conducted annually by the NYC Health Department to track key indicators of New Yorkers’ health, inform health program decisions, and increase the understanding of the relationship between health behavior and health status. The CHS is an address-based sample (ABS) survey with an annual sample of approximately 10,000 randomly selected adults aged 18 and older from all five boroughs of New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island).

The CHS collects information at neighborhood, borough and citywide levels. This data is self-reported and includes health outcomes and risk factors. Surveys are made available in English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese). This is a push-to-web survey, so most respondents self-complete the questionnaire via the web after receiving a mailed invitation. Respondents can also opt for a paper survey or to complete the survey over the phone with an interviewer.

The ABS methodology was introduced starting with the 2021 survey year. Data from survey year 2021 and subsequent years will soon be made available.

The Community Health Survey (CHS) started in 2002 as a cross-sectional telephone-based design survey. A computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system was used to collect survey data from selected respondents with landline telephones and cell phones. The sample size and interview languages have remained consistent across methodologies. The telephone-base design was used from survey years 2002 through 2020.

Public Use Data

Datasets are available on this page for each year of the CHS. For more information on the CHS, visit our Methodology page.

Before downloading any datasets, review the following information:

• Data must be analyzed in a software program capable of handling complex survey data (such as SUDAAN or STATA.). Annotated sample code for analysis using SAS and SUDAAN is provided for each year below.
• Code in SAS without SUDAAN (SAS), as well as code in R (R), are also available.
• A question matrix (PDF) shows which topics are available each year.
• Some conditions may be rare or the sample sizes for some populations quite small, making CHS estimates potentially unreliable. Organizations have various guidelines for when an estimate should be considered unreliable. The Health Department's suggested guidelines for CHS data reliability (PDF) incorporate relative standard error (RSE), confidence interval width, and sample size.
• For an analysis requiring the combination of multiple years of data, a multi-year weight is needed. Please complete the EPI data request form to request more information on multi-year survey weights.
• Before analyzing the data below, please read our analytic considerations.
• For any published analysis using downloadable CHS data, please reference this webpage’s URL, the CHS year(s) analyzed and the date on which the dataset was downloaded (suggested citation below).

Datasets

Suggested Citation

New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Community Health Survey [YEAR(S)]; public use dataset accessed on [DATE].

More Information

• Methodology