Survey methods

The UHERO Rapid Survey was designed to inform and refine public health initiatives in Hawai‘i amidst the challenges brought on by COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the survey has expanded to collect data on health outcomes, healthcare experiences, and social determinants of health more generally. We have established a statewide cohort of over 2000 adult Hawai‘i residents for longitudinal observation. Five survey waves have been completed to date in May 2022, November 2022, June 2023, March 2024 and December 2024. Sample sizes vary by wave between 1100 and 2200 participants.

Participants receive a $20 gift card for their time. The survey form is available online in multiple languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, Ilocano, and Tagalog. Recruitment is supported by several community organizations.

The survey data has been weighted to maximize representativeness of Hawaii state population. The data has been weighted by age, gender and level of education. Iterative proportional fitting (raking) has been used to implement survey weighting. This method continues to adjust the weights until the sample distribution approximately matches the population distributions for the selected weighting variables. The design effect is 1.4.