Title: Adult Questions on Voice, Speech, Swallowing and Language (VSSL) and Children's Questions on Speech-Language Development and Balance/Dizziness Problems on the 2012 National Health Interview Survey The purpose of this agreement is to provide funding for a collaborative effort with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) to develop a Voice, Speech, and Language Supplement to include in the 2012 National Health Interview Survey (NIHS), which is conducted by U.S. Census workers under contractual agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). NIDCD funds will support the gathering of current, reliable prevalence data for disorders of voice (+ swallowing), speech, and language (VSL) that have been missing from our national statistics. In fact, there is very little recent information from any community-based or population-based surveys on the prevalence of VSL disorders. With NIDCD support, the VSL questions will be developed and programmed into the survey instrument over the next 15 months, with in-house testing of the questions at NCHS continuing through the spring/summer 2011. The questions will be developed for use in both the ?sample? adult questionnaire [N≈30,000] and the ?sample? child questionnaire (answers supplied by a parent or other principal caretaker). Questions on balance/dizziness problems experienced by children will also be included. The issues to include in the questionnaires were selected as the priority areas from among several discussed by ad hoc groups of experts, convened for the purpose of identifying ?measureable? objectives that will inform the clinical (epidemiological) and research community, Federal, State and Local governmental agencies, and the public. Data collection is expected to occur from January 2012 through December 2012. NCHS will develop data editing and weighting specifications for the questions. An edited, final public release dataset is expected to be available by August 2013.
