The CHAS is a comprehensive surveillance system in South Carolina that conducts an annual survey. The survey provides state-level statistical estimates on health issues of South Carolina children.
Unfortunately, the sample size of the CHAS survey is not large enough to produce reliable county-level estimates, so CHAS county-level data is not available at this time.
The CHAS is a cross-sectional telephone survey. Every year, surveillance is conducted monthly using a standardized questionnaire through a computer-assisted-telephone-interviewing (CATI) system.
CHAS interviewers ask questions related to a wide variety of health-related topics, including breast feeding, early childhood development, health care access and utilization, oral health, mental health, physical health, nutrition, physical activity, family involvement and parent opinion on topics such as tobacco and childhood obesity. Data is collected through monthly telephone interviews.
CHAS is a follow-up to the South Carolina Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, or BRFSS. The BRFSS is a cross-sectional annual telephone survey that assesses health characteristics of non-institutionalized adults ages 18 and older. All SC BRFSS respondents with children under the age of 18 living in their households are invited to participate in the CHAS survey. More information about the BRFSS is available.
Participants are not compensated; however, their responses to survey questions provides data to public health leaders to formulate legislation and program strategies to generate systems and policy change to improve the health of children in South Carolina.
Detailed data tables for CHAS survey items are posted every year in the Annual Survey Results section of the DPH website. CHAS data are also available in a public-use dataset.
The CHAS survey is revised each year to meet the child health surveillance needs of the state of South Carolina. CHAS staff work to coordinate measurements of health behaviors between adult respondents from the SC BRFSS and child interviews obtained from SC CHAS. Questions to be included in the SC CHAS survey each year are also solicited from the South Carolina public health community. Requests for inclusion of data items are to be submitted to SC CHAS during the fall of the year preceding the survey.
Annual questionnaires dating back to 2012 are available in portable document format (pdf) on the CHAS Annual Questionnaires webpage.
The CHAS is a follow-up to SC BRFSS. In the BRFSS, home telephone numbers are obtained through random-digit dialing.
Generally, data and materials produced by government agencies are in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission. However, we do ask that any published material derived from the data acknowledge CHAS as the original source.
Recommended citation:
South Carolina Children's Health Assessment Survey (CHAS)[appropriate year or years]: South Carolina Department of Public Health, Division of Surveillance, Columbia, SC.
CHAS data are weighted to reflect the population of South Carolina children utilizing various data sources. The use of weighted data adjusts the results of the sample to better represent the entire population of South Carolina. Adjustments are made to account for the unequal probabilities of selection due to the disproportionate sampling method and due to people living in households with different numbers of residential telephone numbers and different numbers of children in the home, as well as unequal non-response rates among different demographic groups.