The NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH) in NYU Langone’s Section for Health Equity leads a large-scale health needs assessment survey that uses a community-engaged and community venue–based approach to gather disaggregated, and often, formative data on the health needs, resources, and priorities of unique Asian American subgroup populations. The data gathered in these Community Health Resources and Needs Assessments (CHRNAs) present a nuanced understanding of the varied contextual factors influencing community health. CSAAH distills the survey findings in our easy-to-read community health reports and our community research briefs, which provide plain language summaries of CSAAH research from recent peer-reviewed publications.

Community Health Resource and Needs Assessment Reports

The primary purposes of our CHRNA project are to determine priority health issues, available resources to address those challenges, and the best evidence-based approaches to meet community needs. A first exploratory round of CHRNA surveys, developed in 2004, aimed to better understand the health needs of and resources available in the Filipino American community. Between 2004 and 2006, similar efforts were implemented in the Cambodian, Chinese, Korean, South Asian, Vietnamese, and Japanese communities in New York City.

A second round of CHRNA analyses, performed between 2013 and 2016, generated valuable, disaggregated data for these community populations, and further assessed population changes, population health improvements, and changes in risk and protective factors in Arab American, Bangladeshi, Himalayan, Nepali, Indian, Indo-Caribbean, and Pakistani subgroups as well.

We have completed a third wave of the CHRNA project to gather disaggregated health data on emerging Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (NH/PI) communities experiencing health disparities, which was administered in three regional communities across the United States.

Our community health reports, based on surveys collected in the target communities, summarize local community insights into numerous determinants of overall general health, including length of residence in the United States, English language proficiency, educational attainment, employment and income, perceived health, health insurance and access to care, nutrition and physical activity, mental health, screening for cancer and other chronic diseases, sleep deprivation, and connections to social and religious environments.

To obtain our culturally tailored CHRNA reports, please contact Jennifer Wong, MPH, program manager, at jennifer.wong@nyulangone.org.

Community Research Briefs

CSAAH generates a curated series of plain-language, easily readable community briefs to share our research findings with the Asian American and NH/PI communities in which we work.

We invite you to access and download any of the following community research briefs:

• Turning the Health Equity Lens to Diversity in Asian American Health Profiles (2024)
• IDEAL: A Community-Academic-Governmental Collaboration Toward Improving Evidence-Based Data Collection on Race and Ethnicity (2023)
• A Culturally Tailored Community Health Worker Intervention Leads to Improvement in Patient-Centered Outcomes for Immigrant Patients with Type 2 Diabetes
• Hepatitis B Screening and Vaccination Behaviors in a Community-Based Sample of Chinese and Korean Americans in New York City
• Racial and Ethnic Difference in Falls Among Older Adults: Results from the California Health Interview Survey