General Description
The New York State Expanded Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2013-2014 (2014 eBRFSS) was design to supplement the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which is conducted annually in New York State. The purpose of the 2014 eBRFSS was to produce local information on key public health issues. Data for the project were collected from April 15, 2013 to May 10, 2014. The 2014 eBRFSS reached both households with landline telephones and households which only had cell phones. Like the annual BRFSS, New York State's 2014 eBRFSS was designed to be representative of the non-institutionalized adult household population, aged 18 years and older.

Reported Health Indicators
There are a total of 50 health indicators included in the report. The health indicators include 10 measures included in the New York State Department of Health’s Prevention Agenda, NYS Health Innovation Plan (SHIP), Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) Program, or the NYS Community Health Indicator Reports (CHIRS). An additional 40 important health indicators are also included. The indicators are organized by the Priority Area of the Prevention Agenda and are reported statewide, by region, and by county.

Data Collection Methodology, Sampling and Weighting
The data collection methods for the 2014 eBRFSS aligned with the CDC’s standard annual BRFSS methods. The 2014 eBRFSS questionnaire used standard questions from the BRFSS. Survey interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish. There were 31,690 completed interviews.

The sampling plan for the eBRFSS was developed to result in valid health indicator estimates for New York City (NYC) and each of the 57 counties outside NYC. The sampling approach stratified landlines by county and implemented a disproportionate stratified sampling design that accounted for both listed-households and unlisted numbers. Cell phone households were accounted for through additional strata that covered contiguous groups of counties.

Data were weighted to represent the population using a methodology known as iterative proportional fitting (raking). Raking adjusted the data so that groups underrepresented in the sample were more accurately represented in the estimated rates. Raking also enabled surveys conducted by cell phone to be included in the weighting and to accurately match sample distributions of specified demographic characteristics of the population. The raking categories included in the eBRFSS were: age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, marital status, owner/renter status, telephone usage (i.e. landline and cell phone combinations), and county of residence.

Limitations of Data Use:
During data analysis, criteria were applied to suppress rates based on too few surveys to be reliable and to identify rates that are highly variable. Rates in which less than 10 respondents were in the numerator or less than 50 respondents were in the denominator were considered unreliable and suppressed from reporting. Rates considered to have high variability due to having confidence limits greater than ±10% are noted.