I just received a phone call from the Vermont Department of Health, and the woman said it was a health-care survey.
Yes, for many today is a business day, and for me it is also a family day was our adult children are visiting from DC and SC, so I wanted to just hang up and say that I was not available. But, I’m a sucker for open and transparent government and imagined that this call must have some lofty purpose of generating information for universal health care. OK, I’ll do it.
The entire survey was about smoking habits in Vermont!
What a waste of taxpayer money. I was asked six different times via the telephone surveyor it we had smokers in the house. Several of the questions were worded so strangely that I had to ask to have them reread once or twice! The questions were worded so strangely that it was easy to give the wrong answer without having the questions reread two or three times. I told the surveyor that we were a household of non-smokers. There was no easy short form to allow the surveyor to move on to another call. Instead we went through the whole kit-n-caboodle.
• What will our the state department of health do with such a survey?
• How will the information be used?
• Who wrote such a poorly worded survey?
• Was it some type of push poll attempting to validate money spent by the state on an anti-smoking campaign?
• Is this a valid use of limited state funds and state employee time, or was this an outsourced contractual survey, and if so who was paid to do it right now and why?
and as such I have no real problem with attempts to assess smoking habits in Vermont and devote resources to understanding the nature of the problem. What you were called about might be a new version of this survey.
I don’t have anything to say about the question of outsourcing or the quality of the specific survey without knowing more, but I’d say that surveys and assessments are a perfectly reasonable expense when it comes to developing programs aimed at the public.
If and when you are contacted by a surveyor, please ask the person where they are located and for whom they work. Many of these functions (some previously performed by Vermonters) have been farmed out to companies in Texas, Kentucky and additonal southern (right-to-work) hot spots.
If they’re legit state employees, consider it another Christmas miracle.
Vermont’s Department of Health has a lot of good people working for it, but Maggie’s point about the quality of the survey is no surprise to those of us who have experience working with VDH. With Dr. Harry Chen soon to assume leadership, we can hope that this important state agency will get some much-needed attention. Things can only get better.
Here is a report of the Vermont annual smoking survey – presumably the survey for which Maggie was polled. The Dept of Health web site indicates that the survey is “used to help evaluate the effectiveness of Vermont Tobacco Control Program efforts to reduce smoking and increase awareness and knowledge of smoking-related issues.” Seems like a worthy goal to me – I can’t comment on the appropriateness of the survey design.
Here’s the link for anyone interesting in digging deeper.
Vermont Smoking Report
Hasn’t the tobacco settlement fund been used for other non tobacco projects?
Might this survey have anything to do with how much wiggle room the tobacco settlement money has to be diverted to other tasks.
and it was incredibly ridiculous–redundant, badly worded. At one point they asked something like, ‘have these advertisements made you think more about not smoking?’ I explained that since I hadn’t thought in many years about starting to smoke, they couldn’t have had that effect–but i didn’t want to give that answer, because then it would sound like they were ineffective. the nice lady giggled and said ‘ we’ll put you down as a don’t-know.’
all for smoking cessation campaigns, all against money-wasting surveys to tell us things that are probably fairly obvious to start with.
about the exact questions, who devised the questions, and who is being paid to make the calls.
For example, the one asking if advertising made the respondent want to smoke makes me wonder if the polling itself could be acting as a push poll to get people to smoke – or is helping cigarette companies better hone their marketing?
Maggie – you were called for the Adult Tobacco Survey, sponsored by VDH’s Tobacco Control Program. The survey is funded by Master Settlement dollars, not tax dollars.
What will we do with the survey? How will the information be used? The information gathered has two purposes – surveillance of risk factors for chronic disease in Vt and evaluation of the program. The link that many have provided is the report that was produced two years ago, the last time the survey was done. The data is used to monitor smoking rates among all VTers and among specific groups of the population that have high rates of smokers (ie, lower income VTers). We also deliver data back to the Feds as part of the evaluation they require for the program and we feed the data to local health offices and community groups for public health planning and monitoring.
Who wrote the survey? The CDC. The ATS is taken largely from a survey derived by the CDC for the purposes of surveillance. The Tobacco Control program and VDH surveillance staff and the VT Tobacco Evaluation Review Board also have input into some of the survey questions . . . and, though the group I manage at VDH is responsible for the survey, I agree some of the questions are not great. Unfortunately, they’ve been part of the survey for years and changing questions can impact the comparability from year-to-year. So people are reluctant to make changes.
The survey is developed, designed, analyzed and reported on by VDH staff. The data collection (ie, calling) is outsourced to ICF Macro. While Macro’s parent company is not VT-based, the data collection portion of the company is based in Burlington. The data collection is centrally managed out of the Burlington office and they have a small call center in Burlington. The also have a large center on the old air force base in Plattsburgh. They are the only “local” company capable of doing the data collection at the level we need.
Was it a push poll? No, strictly used for surveillance and evaluation.
Valid use of time/money? Already adressed the $$ issue, it is MSA dollars not state tax dollars. As for a valid use of employee time? Well, I think so, but I’m a data geek who believes that our programming is better informed and more targeted when it is based in scientific data. And that’s why I do what I do.
A couple of other things: one, because of state budget cuts, staff shortages and the incredibly LONG time it takes to get contracts through the system, the ATS timing this year pushed into the Holidays. Normally we try to be out of the field around Thanksgiving, so that we are not bothering people during the holidays. I apologize for any inconvenince to you or your family caused by the Survey. BUT, I do want to say thank you for taking the time to complete the survey. We appreciate your cooperation and input!
If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at my office.
Jennifer Hicks
Research, Epidemiology, and Evaluation Unit Chief
Center for Health Statistics
Vermont Department of Health
802-863-7264