Community Health Assessment: Data Sources, Methods, and Analysis

This report examines the essential data sources utilized in community health assessments. It distinguishes between primary and secondary data, highlighting the significance of both in evaluating community health. Primary data, derived directly from the community through surveys, focus groups, and interviews, offers firsthand insights into the health status and needs of the population. Secondary data, sourced from existing records at local, state, and national levels, provides valuable background information on population demographics, health indicators, and environmental factors. The report emphasizes the importance of using reliable and valid data, especially in community surveys. The report also highlights the importance of using the most recent available data in conducting a health assessment.

Running Head: DATA SOURCES 1
Major Data Sources for Community Health Assessment
Name of Student
Name of Professor
Institution Affiliation
Date

DATA SOURCES 2
Community Health Assessment
Community health assessment is essential since it assists in providing a snapshot of local
systems, environmental changes, and systems that are in place and in the identification of health
areas that require improvement. The collected data when assessing community health also helps
in the formulation of health strategies that aim at making sustainable and positive changes. The
two major categories of data used in carrying out assessment of community health are; primary
sources and secondary sources.
Primary data
Primary data is the most used when conducting a health assessment of a given
community. Primary data is collected directly from the people within the community. There are
four main categories of primary data that are used during the health assessment. They are
community forums, focus groups, community surveys and key informant interviews (Dattalo,
Wise, Ford Ii, Abramson & Mahoney, 2017). Although all these categories of primary data have
their weaknesses and strengths, community surveys have proved to be more effective in terms of
reliability, validity, and repeatability as compared to others. Hence, community surveys are
effective when conducting estimation since they are performed from a representative sample of a
given population (Drake, Rancilio & Stafford, 2017).
Secondary data
Secondary data involves the usage of data that has been collected by someone else other
than the user. Researchers who use secondary data in carrying out a health assessment of a
community should try to use the most recent available data. Secondary data can be retrieved

DATA SOURCES 3
from local, national, state, and regional sources. Some of the types of secondary data include
health status data, population data, and health status data (Kahn et al, 2016).

DATA SOURCES 4
References
Dattalo, M., Wise, M., Ford Ii, J. H., Abramson, B., & Mahoney, J. (2017). Essential resources
for implementation and sustainability of evidence-based health promotion programs: a
mixed methods multi-site case study. Journal of community health, 42(2), 358-368.
Drake, B. F., Rancilio, D. M., & Stafford, J. D. (2017). Research methods. In Public Health
Research Methods for Partnerships and Practice (pp. 174-187). Routledge.
Kahn, M. G., Callahan, T. J., Barnard, J., Bauck, A. E., Brown, J., Davidson, B. N., ... & Liaw,
S. T. (2016). A harmonized data quality assessment terminology and framework for the
secondary use of electronic health record data. Egems, 4(1).