R Observatory: Metrics for brfssdata version 0.1.1

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

brfssdata

0.1.1Package record

Access CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Data

0packages depend

757downloads / year

28.3%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Muntasir MasumCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Download, cache, and analyze annual microdata from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/. Each requested survey year is downloaded once as a compact file hosted on public releases, verified against a published checksum, and cached locally; queries then run through 'DuckDB' (via the 'duckdb' package), so column selection and repeat analyses never re-transfer data. Survey-design helpers construct 'srvyr' design objects with year-appropriate weights, strata, and primary sampling units, including explicit handling of the 2011 weighting methodology change and of the codes CDC uses for missing-type answers.

Changes in 0.1.1

BRFSS 2025 is available: 356,158 respondents from 47 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico. CDC excluded California, Mississippi, Nevada, and the US Virgin Islands from the 2025 public file for collecting too little data, and the 2024 file has no Tennessee respondents, so pooling 2024 with 2025 names all five jurisdictions in the state-participation warning. The year reaches installed versions through the data manifest without upgrading.
Three 2025 questionnaire changes are worth knowing before pooling years. The respondent sex questions (LANDSEX4, CELLSEX4) accept only male or female, and the call ends for anyone who gives neither, so the 2025 sample has no counterpart to the don't-know and refused answers earlier years recorded. The child-sex item (RCSBORG1) offers only boy or girl, and the 2024 file carries its predecessors (RCSGEND1, RCSXBRTH) with no values at all. COVIDWHN's label in CDC's file says first COVID-19 vaccination, but CDC's 2025 codebook asks for the most recent one.

Show all changes in 0.1.1Hide the rest of the changes in 0.1.1

The crosswalk gains the 2025 renames (LANDSEX4, CELLSEX4, NOBCUSE9, and TYPCNT10, whose stem CDC shortened to fit SAS's eight-character limit) and a new child-sex family linking RCSGENDR, RCSGEND1, and RCSBORG1; all are verified against CDC's codebooks. The notes for EXERANY2 and CVDEXR03 now give the 2001 wording changes as the reason they are not comparable with their predecessors; the earlier notes blamed a don't-know recode that CDC's 2000 codebook shows never happened.
The data manifest now records upstream provenance for every annual asset: the CDC download URL of the source SAS Transport zip, that file's sha256 and size as downloaded, the download and processing dates, and the row and column counts of the published parquet. The fields are additive within manifest schema 2, so installed versions that predate them read the new manifest unchanged (#1).
brfss_year_info() reports the CDC source file behind each year: new source_file, source_format, and source_sha256 columns plus a downloaded date, joined from the same build-pipeline provenance record as the manifest (#5).
brfss_year_info()$codebook_url for 1989 now points at CDC's web archive, where CDC moved that year's documentation page in August 2026; the live address returns 404 to scripts. The year inventory is fetched from the data-meta release, so installed versions pick the corrected address up without upgrading. The datasets article and the README no longer describe a 1984 public-use file as available. Its documentation is archived, but the file itself is no longer served.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("brfssdata", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("muntasirmasum/brfssdata")

Development version from muntasirmasum/brfssdata. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-brfssdata

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-brfssdata

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-brfssdata

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 5.5 min · r-release-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-09-30
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-09-04
OK7 OK2026-08-22

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.1.1

READMEYes · 1,021 wordsVignettesYes · 1 · evaluation depends on the environmentNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.1.1Citation fileYes · computed when R runs itWebsiteYes · pkgdown

The repository also keeps web-only articles.

Help pages: 18 (3 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 100%14 run in a plain check (5 of them under a condition)
Exported functions with examples: 92%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 92%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (1)

Getting started with brfssdata HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

757

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #16,352 · ~2/day · ~63/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

32830 days

75790 days

7571 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on17 r2u43 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

muntasirmasum/brfssdata ↗Account: muntasirmasum

4Stars

0Forks

5Open issues

0Open PRs

43Releases

99Commits

1Commit identities

brfsscdcduckdbepidemiologyparquetpublic-healthrr-package

99 commits · Last activity 2026-10-17 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): not measured
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 4
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: not measured

Stars over time

2026-08-22 · 12026-09-07 · 4

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

14 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 8 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/muntasirmasum/brfssdata on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (3)

Code of conductContributing guideIssue templates

Docs source (3)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-08-29 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-08-29, before release 0.1.1 (2026-10-18)

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting

Show all practicesHide 4 practices

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Research and citation (1)

CITATION.cff

Lint, format, editor (2)

AirVS Code

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2026-08-02
Named in .Rbuildignore: .claude
Named in .gitignore: .claude
Commits: at least 19 crediting it in the message

Counts are commits, not lines of code. Commits by a tool's accounts count once across all of its accounts. Commits crediting it are the largest count among its credit lines, a minimum.How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

15 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing brfssdata adds 30 packages (18 with compiled code, 33 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, duckdb 4.6 MB, srvyr 3.2 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.2

Imports (9)

cli DBI duckdb jsonlite rlang srvyr (>= 1.0.0)tibbletoolsutils

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (8)

curl dplyr knitr rmarkdown spelling survey testthat withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (1)

Muntasir Masum

Releases (2)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

0.1.1Latest
record
2026-10-18 · current release · diff ↗
0.1.0
record
2026-08-21
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2026-08-21
Total releases: 2 / 1 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.2
Bundled data: 1.7 KB / 2 files
Download size: 457 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("brfssdata")

The package provides a citation file that builds its entry when R runs it. Run citation() to see it.

The repository also keeps a CITATION.cff.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for brfssdata version 0.1.1 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-19. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-19, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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