75 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS)
75.3 Description
- HIPPA-compliant, patient-level
- Joint research project between the state departments of health and the CDC
- Collects state-specific, population-based data on maternal attitudes and experiences before, during, and shortly after pregnancy.
- Currently forty-six states, the District of Columbia, New York City, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico currently participate in PRAMS, representing approximately 81% of all U.S. live births.
- These data can be used to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants.
- The PRAMS Data Portal has a PRAMS dataset for each year from 2000 – 2011. For any of these datasets, you can filter, export, create custom visualizations, view associated metadata, and more.
75.6 Collection Methodology
- Each month, a stratified sample of women who have recently given birth is drawn from the state’s birth certificate files.
- Each participating state samples between 1300 and 3400 women per year.
- Women from higher risk populations are oversampled.
- Women are first contacted by mail. If there is no response after multiple attempts, they are contacted and interviewed by phone.
- Data collection tools are standardized across states.
75.7 Available at
Free but need to submit a proposal. See https://www.cdc.gov/prams/prams-data/researchers.htm
75.8 User Guide/Data Dictionary
See https://www.cdc.gov/prams/prams-data/P6-Core-Codebook.htm
75.12 Special Notes
There have been some major changes to the questionnaires over the years. For questions included in each phase see https://www.cdc.gov/prams/questionnaire.htm#current ?