Survey of Racism and Public Health

Setting and Data Collection

The CASJPH racism and public health survey is a web-based cross-sectional survey that includes sociodemographic information, self-reported experiences with discrimination, social status, financial and food insecurity, voting practices, policing experiences, and health. The survey consisted of 84 questions, and the average time to survey completion was 15 minutes. 

We hired Qualtrics Research Services (QRS) to recruit participants, collect online survey data, and provide incentives to participants. Our team provided QRS with the survey URL and back-end access to an institutional account to host and manage the data collection. Our research team did not recruit or interact with participants. 

QRS recruited qualified respondents from Qualtrics’ panel sources based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria and sampling quotas. Criteria for selecting the participants were as follows: 18 years or older, English-speaking/reading, and living in Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, or Virginia (areas within Health and Human Services Regions 1, 2, or 3). The sampling quotas provided to QRS were demographic variables that oversample racial/ethnic minoritized groups. The following demographic quotas were requested: age (30% aged 18–34, 32% aged 35–54, and 38% aged 55 or older) and racial/ethnic (50% White, 20% Black, 20% Latino/a/x, and 10% Other) groups. The survey went live in March 2023 and closed in April 2023 once the target demographic sampling quotas were met. 

Profiling data for online survey participants were collected using larger internal surveys that were interspersed between client surveys according to QRS’ standard panel management practices. Panelists have joined the QRS panel through hundreds of different recruitment sources, including direct sign-up, co-registration offers on partners’ websites, targeted emails sent by online partners to their audiences, graphical and text banner placement on partners’ websites, trade show presentations, targeted postal mail invitations, TV advertisements, member referrals, and telephone recruitment of targeted populations.

Study Participants

Over 9,000 individuals (N = 9,096) were recruited to complete the 2023 Survey of Racism and Public Health. Of these, 44% did not consent to participate (n = 1,106), did not complete the survey (n = 542), or were removed through QRS data cleaning (n = 2,389). Reasons for removal through data cleaning included non-sensical answers, duplicates, bots, contradictory responses, infeasible response values for weight or height, and invalid IP address. The remaining 56% (n = 5,059) consented to participate and completed the survey.