13 July 2010

The Herndon Alliance research is based on a psychographic segmentation of Americans according to their attitudes around health care and other factors. This segmentation was made using the American Values Survey, an in-home, 500+ item survey of values and issues conducted since 1992 in the U.S.

Herndon Alliance's values-based research, developed and conducted by American Environics, created a Road Map identifying potential paths for successfully broadening public support for health reform by activating certain values and beliefs that Americans' hold.

The research is based on the segmentation of the public according to their attitudes on many factors including health reform, and results in actionable political clusters. This segmentation was made using the American Values Survey, an in-home, 500+ item survey of values and issues conducted since 1992 in the United States. Through the analysis of the social values survey data, the Road Map:

• Identified the Base and the Anti-Base and in so doing identified the world views and characteristics of those who most strong support and those who most strongly oppose health reform
• Identified the Constituencies of Opportunity—those constituencies not commonly associated with the Base supporting health reform, but who share many of the values that make them possible supporters of needed change
• Identified the motivating values and world views of our Constituencies of Opportunity, allowing us to craft policy initiatives that are logical entailments of these existing world views.

The Road Map, a powerful tool to create new strategies and to evaluate the effectiveness of old ones, looks at the entire landscape of human values in order to understand how an issue's values operate in the context of the complex, contradictory and highly variegated world views that make up America's cultural and psychological landscape.

This research is the critical starting point for the process of crafting political initiatives that will begin to change that landscape.

Following the development of the Road Map, eight focus groups (based in Ohio and Georgia) were conducted with identified segments: the Health Justice Base and Constituencies of Opportunity (including the Proper Patriots, Marginalized Middle-Agers, and Mobile Materialists); as well as two demographic focus groups with Latina women and African Americans.

The research and analytic process also created four Strategic Initiatives, based on the ways these segments reason about health care, including:

• Access to guaranteed affordable health care for all;
• Cancer screenings;
• Healthy next generation;
• Health care Bill of Rights

The processes ended with a nationwide survey of 1,300 voters, conducted October 29 – November 6, 2006. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the California Endowment, and the Public Welfare Foundation funded this work.

Herndon Alliance's second round of research, analysis, and policy refinement evolved from our first round of findings. While the American public favors health reform and access, barriers were preventing our success at moving forward in bringing our change to the health care system. The identified barriers include:

• Undocumented immigrants
• Higher taxes
• Confidence in government
• Affordable choices for small businesses

Further rounds of research, including research conducted after passage of the health care reform law, have continued to build on the foundation described here.