The design of the community tracking study: a longitudinal study of health system change and its effects on people.

Abstract

Editor's Note: Design of the Community Tracking Study: A Longitudinal Study of Health System Change and Its Effects on People is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional articles describing large-scale data collection efforts and plans for analyzing such data. The series will be known as Data Reports New surveys or changes in existing, ongoing surveys ought to be known widely if the research to be done with the collected data can have a meaningful impact on policy making. I hope articles about various surveys' sample designs and topics to be covered in the questionnaires will shorten the time between public release and analyses of the data. Because of the costs of large-scale data collection, most of the projects likely to be described in this series will be government-funded efforts. It is, perhaps, all the more interesting then that the subject of the first <(Data Reports, the Community Tracking Study, is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.?K. Swartz