Choosing a topic

After a couple hours of good research, I finally narrowed down some topics of interest that I'd love to spend more time learning about. Initially, I wanted to focus on childhood nutrition and socioeconomic factors that affect their health throughout the lifespan. In America, there are so many low-income cultures that create malnourished societies. To prevent these communities from becoming unhealthy, poor, malnourished, etc. in the first place, intervention is needed to fix the root problem and this begins with the children who will be the leaders of tomorrow. I visited the knowledge center website and began to search through hundreds of thousands peer-review articles and scholarly journals and continued to narrow down my search by using specific keywords and phrases that pertained to my research question: How does socioeconomic status effect the nutrition of children in these cultures and how does this affect them cross the lifespan? I focused on these search terms: “childhood nutrition”, “health”, “health priorities”, “community”, “poverty”, “public health”, “malnutrition”, socioeconomics”, “child development” and a few more.

The two articles I was most interested and most closely related to my research question are as follows: 1) “Poverty in America: How Public Health Practice can make a difference” by Paul Campbell Erwin. This article struck me with the amazing information it held. Erwin related this relevant information in the United States to other work he had pursued in third world countries and correlated the information that people of all race and cultures suffer through poverty and this directly affects the nutrition and lives of communities and spreads like a disease. He offered ideas of empowerment and education as resolution to the poverty epidemic, and to help improve nutrition he hopes his ideas can resolve poverty issues as well, beginning with children. He described in detail some of the drastic effects poverty has on all walks of life and through every stage of the lifespan. To fix our communities, we need to learn to take care of ourselves most importantly our health: mind, body, and soul.

Erwin, Paul Campbell. (2008). Poverty in America: How Public Health Practice can make a difference. American Journal of Public Health, 98(9), 1570-1572. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2007.127787

2) The second article I really liked was “Parental Perceptions and Childhood Dietary Quality”. Adamo, Kristi B; Brett, Kendra E. (2014). Parental Perceptions and Childhood Dietary Quality. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 18(4), 978-995. doi: 10.1007/s10995-013-1326-6

I tried focusing on the “language” the experts use in the peer-reviewed journals that we talked about in class and in the online video I watched. I looked for keywords and ideas and topics that caught my attention in the abstract and if I liked it I read a bit more and went from there. Some were good and some not so good and it took some time until I found something I was really interested in and a topic that I wanted to learn more about. I remember in class we learned to look for topics that has some sort of “debate” in them because that meant they held information from both sides of an argument or idea but I didn’t find very many. I’m very happy with the first article I found and I’m excited to continue researching to see what else I can find.

This is where I left off on my research:

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