Health Polling Resources

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center developed a separate Health Poll Database. The goals of this database were multiple: to make the health questions more accessible, to make trends easy to find and use, to assist researchers in finding the questions they are interested in by applying topic tags to individual questions, and to educate users on the relationships between different aspects of health and health policy.

Pollsters have explored people’s knowledge about disease and its spread and treatment, the actions people have taken to protect themselves, their willingness to be vaccinated, their reasons for not following public health recommendations, their fears about the disease, their information sources and their experiences with illness, health care, and vaccination, and more. But what do they measure?

If you care about health policy, you may be wondering why you should pay attention to what the public thinks or what they have to say in surveys. After all, in a country like the United States, isn’t health care shaped by powerful interests like health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, lobbyists, and politicians, rather than the people served by the health care system?