The US Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has listed the ACE questions as an “Optional Module” for states and territories to administer through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) since 2009. In April 2019, the CDC updated information about the states' inclusion of the ACE module in the BRFSS and reported that “…since 2009, 42 states plus the District of Columbia have included ACE questions for at least one year on their survey.” By the end of 2019, only two states—Massachusetts and Wyoming—have not included the ACEs module. In 2019, 22 states* added the module—6 for the first time (Alabama, Delaware, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Rhode Island).
The BRFSS is an ongoing data collection program designed to measure behavioral risk factors for the adult population (18 years of age or older) living in households. The original Kaiser Permanente-CDC ACE Study began in 1995 and completed in 1997, but participants were followed for 20 years. New data on the more than 17,000 participants continued to be collected until the end of 2015.
In 2018 alone, 17 states included the ACE module in the BRFSS, four of them (Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey, and West Virginia) for the first time. Of the remaining eight states that had never included the ACE module in 2018 (Alabama, Delaware, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wyoming), only two remain at the end of 2019. Here is a state-by-state spreadsheet that records the year(s) when states included the ACEs module.
Many states, but not all, produce reports that provide analysis and context for the ACEs data. The development of these reports may take two or more years to produce once the survey data is collected. If you are aware of a report of any kind (they range from multi-page reports to single page infographics), please respond to this post in the comment section. With information from you and other sources, this post on state reports on BRFSS ACE module data will be updated.
Many other ACE studies have been done in the last few years, including by the Crittenton Foundation, the National Survey of Children's Health, Washington State University’s survey of elementary schoolchildren, of people living in Philadelphia, and of populations in England and other countries. To see a list, go to this section of the Resources Center on ACEs Connection.
Below are slides showing the states that administered the ACE Optional Module on their BRFSS questionnaire from 2009 through 2020.
*AL, DE, FL, IN, IA, KS, MI, MS, MO, NJ, NM, NY, ND, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, TN, VA, WV, WI
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