Health Issue and Target Population Essay
For this assignment, you are to select a target population with a specific health issue and research how social, cultural, and behavior factors of the target population contribute to health outcomes associated with the health issue. The 1,200-1,500 word Research Paper must including the following:Health Issue and Target Population Essay
Introduction: Provide a concise synopsis of the purpose of the paper and a general introduction to the target population and the health issue.
Target Population: Provide a description about the target population that you have selected; provide demographic information about the population; and discuss relevant social, cultural, and behavior factors that affect this population.
Health Issue: Provide information discussing the health issue that you have selected; include a history of knowledge and public health understanding regarding the health issue; how it has evolved; biological and epidemiological information related to the disease; and major social, cultural, and behavior factors that affect or relate to the health issue.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
Relationship Between Health Issue and Target Population: Analyze how social, cultural, and behavior factors in the target population contribute to the health issue; and identify what factors/characteristics are positive or negative and which behaviors/practices/beliefs serve as risk factors or protective factors.
Current Strategies/Interventions: Discuss existing programming to prevent or reduce the health issue within the target population and challenges to interventions and programming.
Recommendations/Conclusion: Make recommendations to resolve the health issue within the target population based on your review of current literature and what you have learned throughout the course.
Minimum of Five References: Use the GCU Library to locate at least five resources, including at least two peer-reviewed articles.
Refer to the “Academic Writing Guidelines Resource.”
Be prepared to present a rough draft of your Research Paper for peer review at the beginning of Topic 6.
Use the completed “Peer Review Guide” from Topic 6 in making revisions and modifications to the final draft of your Research Paper.
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to Lopes Write. Please refer to the directions in the Student Success Center.
Academic Writing Guidelines Resource
Description Guidelines and Examples
Organization and
Structure Organization is the internal structure of a piece of writing, the thread of central meaning that ties the piece together from beginning to ending.
A piece of solid academic writing:
Begins with an introduction regarding the piece’s primary purpose or theme, which prepares the reader for what is to come (i.e., thesis statement).
Ends with a conclusion that summarizes the key points of the piece, draws conclusions, and generally provides closure for the reader.
The body of a piece of academic writing can be organized around a variety of structures.
Examples of organizing structures:
Main idea/thesis, with supporting details/evidence
Comparison-contrast
Deductive logic
Point-by-point analysis
Development of central theme
Chronology or history (e.g., of an event, process, era)
Solid academic writing uses transitional words and phrases to provide logical connections and sequencing. Examples of transitional words:
Addition: also, again, as well as, besides
Consequence: accordingly, as a result, consequently, for this reason.
Generalizing: as a rule, as usual, generally
Illustration: for example, for instance, for one thing.
Emphasis: above all, chiefly, with attention to, especially, Health Issue and Target Population Essay particularly
Similarity: comparatively, coupled with, correspondingly
Exception: aside from, barring, besides, except, excluding
Restatement: in essence, in other words, namely
Comparison: in contrast, by the same token, conversely, instead, likewise
Summarizing: after all, all in all, briefly, in any case, in any event, in conclusion, in short, in summary, finally
Conventions and
Mechanics Description Guidelines and Examples
Solid academic writing is characterized by the proper use of conventions and mechanics, including: spelling, grammar, paragraphing, capitalization, and punctuation.
Examples of conventions and mechanics in academic writing:
Proper use of capitalization, punctuation, and quotation marks.
Subject/verb agreement.
Proper use of pronouns.
Technical abbreviations, acronyms, and units of measurement.
Paragraphs that are indented; consisting of three or more sentences.
Use of title page, headers, and footers.
Avoid the use of: contractions, incomplete and run-on sentences.
Word Choice and Usage In solid academic writing, the use of language is precise, with correct word usage and appropriate word choice.
Guidelines for language use:
In good descriptive writing, strong word choice clarifies and expands ideas.
In persuasive writing, careful word choice moves the reader to a new vision of possibilities.
Effective word choice depends less on an exceptional vocabulary and more on the skill to use everyday words well.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
Use a thesaurus for new words with more specific meaning: For example, “pronounce” for “say,” or “embarkation” for “start.” In academic writing, “it” as the subject of a sentence is not acceptable. Make sure the reader knows what the subject of each sentence is.
Research and Resources In solid academic writing, it is at times necessary to support your thesis or argument with outside research. Use of proper resources for accurate and thoughtful support of any argument or position is essential in academic writing. Some strongly recommended sources for student use are:
GCU Library for search engines located at: http://library.gcu.edu
For instructions on how to use the GCU library, access and view our tutorials at:
http://my.gcu.edu/Academics/Library/Pages/Help.aspx
For good research techniques, view the tutorials in the Student Success Center.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
For nations to improve the health of their populations, some have cogently argued, they need to move beyond clinical interventions with high-risk groups. This concept was best articulated by Rose (1992), who noted that “medical thinking has been largely concerned with the needs of sick individuals.” Although this reflects an important mission for medicine and health care, it is a limited one that does little to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place, and it typically has disregarded issues related to disparities in access to and quality of preventive and treatment services. Personal health care is only one, and perhaps the least powerful, of several types of determinants of health, among which are also included genetic, behavioral, social, and environmental factors (IOM, 2000; Ginning et al., 2002). To modify these, the nation and the intersect oral public health system must identify and exploit the full potential of new options and strategies for health policy and action.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
Three realities are central to the development of effective population-based prevention strategies. First, disease risk is currently conceived of as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. There is no clear division between risk for disease and no risk for disease with regard to levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, alcohol consumption, tobacco consumption, physical activity, diet and weight, lead exposure, and other risk factors. In fact, recommended cutoff points for management or treatment of many of these risk factors have changed dramatically and in a downward direction over time (e.g., guidelines for control of “hypertension” and cholesterol), in acknowledgment of the increased risk associated with common moderately elevated levels of a given risk factor. This continuum of risk is also apparent for many social and environmental conditions as well (e.g., socioeconomic status, social isolation, work stress, and environmental exposures). Any population model of prevention should be built on the recognition that there are degrees of risk rather than just two extremes of exposure (i.e., risk and no risk).
The second reality is that most often only a small percentage of any population is at the extremes of high or low risk. The majority of people fall in the middle of the distribution of risk. Rose (1981, 1992) observed that exposure of a large number of people to a small risk can yield a more absolute number of cases of a condition than exposure of a small number of people to a high risk. This relationship argues for the development of strategies that focus on the modification of risk for the entire population rather than for specific high-risk individuals. Rose (1981) termed the preventive approach the “prevention paradox” because it brings large benefits to the community but offers little to each participating individual. In other words, such strategies would move the entire distribution of risk to lower levels to achieve maximal population gains.Health Issue and Target Population Essay
The third reality, provided by Rose’s (1992) population perspective, is that an individual’s risk of illness cannot be considered in isolation from the disease risk for the population to which he or she belongs. Thus, someone in the United States is more likely to die prematurely from a heart attack than someone living in Japan, because the population distribution of high cholesterol in the United States as a whole is higher than the distribution in Japan (i.e., on a graph of the distribution of cholesterol levels in a population, the U.S. mean is shifted to the right of the Japanese mean). Applying the population perspective to a health measure means asking why a population has the existing distribution of a particular risk, in addition to asking why a particular individual got sick (Rose, 1992). This is critical, because the greatest improvements in a population’s health are likely to derive from interventions based on the first question. Because the majority of cases of illness arise within the bulk of the population outside the extremes of risk, prevention strategies must be applicable to a broad base of the population. American society experienced this approach to disease prevention and health promotion in the early twentieth century, when measures were taken to promote sanitation and food and water safety (CDC, 1999b), and in more recent policies on seat belt use, unleaded gasoline, vaccination, and water fluoridation, some of which are discussed later in this chapter.Health Issue and Target Population Essay