Library: Health Statistics: Getting Started

Credit

With gratitude to The Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences/UAB Libraries for usage of their extensive content.

The U.S. Government collects and makes freely available many valuable statistics and data sets.
Many public-use data files are available for purchase from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Some government sites offer tools for finding data.
States vary in the amount of data they provide, but national statistics often have a state, and sometimes a county and metropolitan area, component.

Be aware that data may not have been collected on your subject.
Data is not be available for very recent years. It takes time to collect, analyze data and publish it.
Local data continue to present challenges.
Although abundant data is freely available on the web from government or education sites, some data may not be free.
Private statistics organizations may charge for hard-to-find data collected through private surveys.
Consider the limitations of your data.
Data is only as reliable as the methods used to collect them and those who collected them. Therefore, some data may be of varying quality.
Certain methods of collecting data, such as telephone surveys, may have inherent limitations.