The California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) has started interviewing state residents in Armenian, continuing its ongoing commitment to accurately represent the health and health care needs of California’s large and diverse population.

First administered by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR) in 2001, CHIS is the largest population-representative state health survey in the United States. It has become a model for generating reliable data about racial and ethnic subgroups and underserved communities, and for making that data freely available to the public.

The 2026 CHIS is the first to be offered in Armenian, one of seven languages that the survey is conducted in along with English, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.

“CHIS is an important snapshot of what policies are working, who might be getting left behind, and where there’s room for improvement,” said Ninez A. Ponce, director of the UCLA CHPR and principal investigator of CHIS. “We’re proud to now offer CHIS in Armenian, which will allow us to capture a more complete picture.”

California is home to approximately 250,000 people of Armenian descent, which is the largest Armenian population in the United States and makes up about half of the Armenian population in the country.

The work to make the survey available in Armenian went beyond simply translating. The translation team reviewed hundreds of documents for accuracy, clarity, and just as critically, cultural relevance.

“Being part of this effort reinforced for me how critical linguistically inclusive data collection is, especially for communities that are often underrepresented in health policy research,” said Kathryn Sarkissian, a pre-med student at UCLA, who was part of the team.

Each year, CHIS interviews more than 20,000 households on a wide range of health matters, from use of and access to health care, to health conditions and behaviors, to a range of topics that influence health: public program participation, housing, income and employment, food security, adverse childhood experiences, and much more.

Many core questions are repeated in each survey in order to measure significant shifts over time. New questions are also added each survey year to address emerging concerns that are important for planning and policy development. Past examples include COVID-19, hate incidents, housing, climate change, gun violence, gambling, and much more.  

The data is then made freely available to government officials and their staffs, public health professionals, policymakers, researchers, students, journalists, advocates, and the public via the online query tools AskCHIS™ and AskCHIS™ Neighborhood Edition (NE). Since launching, there have been more than 2.1 million queries run in AskCHIS™ and AskCHIS™ NE.

Topics can be viewed across a range of sociodemographic factors, including: race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, education, citizenship, language, veteran status, region, and more.

During the 2025–26 California legislative session, the California Health Benefits Review Program (CHBRP) used CHIS data for part of the analysis or background for 15 bills and specifically cited CHIS in the estimates provided in CHBRP’s analyses of eight of those bills.

And in 2025, CHIS was featured in more than 130 publications, including 75+ peer-reviewed journal articles, and more than 275 times in news media.

In 2024, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) honored the California Health Interview Survey with its Inclusive Voices Award for its more than two decades of work advancing data equity.

“When Rick Brown founded the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, one of his guiding ideals was that data should not sit on a shelf. We must make it available and useful to the people who support its collection and whose stories are told within it,” said Ponce, who holds the Fred W. and Pamela K. Wasserman Chair in Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “Offering CHIS in Armenian makes the survey more accessible to a large group of people who live here and adds even more value to the data.”