Topic: Food Access and Health Outcomes in American
Healthy option is hard to find in many millions of low-income Americans who live in the community of "food desert". The communities, that lack convenient access to affordable and healthy food, rather than a supermarket or grocery store, usually have a lot of fast food restaurants and convenience stores. In addition, the store stock fewer and lower quality healthy foods in low-income communities. Fresh food costs can be high in supermarket. Low-income areas usually lack of public transportation, long distance separate home, and supermarket in many rural communities. It is hard for residents of these areas, even those fully informed and motivated to follow the necessary and recommended steps, to maintain a healthy weight for themselves and their children. Too often, economic incentives strongly favor unhealthy eating, and accessibility, safety concerns, and convenience can also promote unhealthy outcomes. 1
Lack of healthy foods can lead to poor diet and higher levels of obesity, and other diet related diseases. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain affordable food that lead to high levels of food insecurity, increasing the number of low- and moderate-income families without access to enough food to sustain a healthy, active life.
This paper will discuss food access and health outcomes in diet-related disease. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relationship between individual’s overall diet, body weight, and the risk of developing diet-related disease. Personal factors can explain some but not all differences in the rate of people’s experience of these problems. Pay attention to food access could be better to understand factors in addition to personal behavior that can lead to differences in diet and health outcomes.
Interest in the relationship between food access and health diet also has its roots in a large number of literature showing those differences in many health outcomes across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status. This is based on the assumption that the differences in food access across racial, ethnic, social and economic status could lead to the health disparities.
In order to examine this relationship, I will use Systematic review, scholarly literature, both primary and secondary sources. Within these documents, I will focus on the behavior and communication strategies. By doing so, I will demonstrate the rationales, purposes, and methods behind the use of food access and its relationship to diet and effects on health outcomes. Medline will be searched for keywords including diet and health outcome from 2005 to 2015. I will examine how food access can influence the outcome of the diet and the diet related disease, and then review the relationships among access to food, diet, obesity, and diet-related problem. This study will allow me to explore the strategies within food access, and how these strategies influence diet and health.
TWO Competencies to be addressed
1. To assemble, critically review, synthesise and interpret published literature (including grey literature) on a public health topic.
i.e., systematic review or literature review that clearly describes and assesses the problem, its magnitude, causes and determinants, and discusses prevention and intervention strategies
2. To use epidemiological or other approaches to describe the health status or health care needs of a defined population and identify environmental or personal risk factors which threaten or enhance health.
i.e., primary or secondary data analysis; policy analysis; an original report built on the Practicum experience (independent of the Practicum report).
Format
1. Abstract of Thesis Proposal
The abstract is a summary of your thesis proposal. It is usually not more than 1 or 2 pages containing the problem statement, the rationale of the study, the hypothesis, the methodology that you are proposing to use, the expected result and the significance of your study. This section gives the reader an overview of your thesis proposal. Don’t try to explain the technical details or methodology of your study here, as these should be included in the latter sections. Try to present your idea in layman language so that even readers who are not in your field could understand. This section should not contain references.
III. Basic Elements of a Thesis Propos
2. Table of Contents
You should list all headings and subheadings with page numbers. Subheadings should be indented.
3. Introduction
This section sets the context for your proposed project and must capture the reader’s interest. You should explain the background of your study starting from a broad picture narrowing in on your research questions, listing the relevant references, as appropriate. The introduction should be at a level that makes it easy to understand for readers with a general background in your field.
4. Systematics Review
The section demonstrates that you are knowledgeable of the primary texts and secondary research studies done by other researchers and ensure that you are not “reinventing the wheel”. It is important to note that this section is not merely a summary of the relevant literature you have read but instead, you have to provide a critical review on it and be able to relate the literature to your proposed research. You should point to areas overlooked or inadequately addressed by previous studies and discuss how your proposed research could contribute to the knowledge advancement in the area. This shows your ability to integrate and synthesize the literature and to develop new ideas and innovations. Proper referencing in this section is very important.
The followings are the most common deficiencies of a literature review and you should try to avoid all of them:
- lack of organization and structure
- lack of focus and coherence
- being repetitive
- failing to cite influential papers or studies
- citing irrelevant and trivial references
- failing to cite the current papers or studies
- failing to critically evaluate cited papers
5. Research Questions and Hypotheses
This section tells reader what you would like to find out in your research. State your research questions and hypotheses explicitly in this section. In most cases, the primary research question should be broad enough to cover your whole proposed research and the subsidiary research questions and hypotheses are more specific c and each of them should focus on a certain aspect of your research. These hypotheses usually form chapters or sub-sections of your final thesis. You should explain how these research questions and hypotheses are formulated.
6. Methodology
This section explains “how” you are going to conduct your research. You should demonstrate that you are fully aware of the alternative research methods and explain how your proposed methodology is more advantageous than the others in attaining your stated objectives.
For quantitative research, you should include:
(i) the research design, e.g. a questionnaire study or a laboratory experiment
(ii) the subjects or data source, e.g. who will participate in the data collection, the sample size and sampling methodology
(iii) the instruments, e.g. the kind of measuring instruments or questionnaires and the reason for choosing these instruments
(iv) procedure, e.g. how you are going to carry out your study, what activities are involved and how long does it take
(v) the methods of analysis, e.g. modeling techniques or statistical methods
You should also discuss the limitations of the proposed methodology, the assumption and the range of validity in data collection.
Where the thesis research involves human subjects, you must also obtain the approval from the appropriate ethics committee. A copy of the approval, if available, should be attached to the proposal.
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If you have conducted a pilot study, please also provide the details here and discuss how the methodology will be improved in view of the previous experience.
For qualitative research, as there are no well-established and widely accepted general rules or principles, you need to elaborate more on the data collection process and how you will analyze the results.
The methodology carries great weight to affect the success of a piece of research. You can have a very good research topic but a poor research methodology could easily ruin the outcome! In order to prepare yourself for your research and to enable the reviewer to understand your proposed study better, you should be more detail in your research methodology. For example, how to collect your data, how many samples to take, what specific methods will you used in analyzing your data.
7. Work Schedule
In this section, you need to identify the tasks and make realistic estimates of the time required for each task. This could be easily done in a table or chart format. Setting important milestones could definitely help to monitor the research progress.
8. Expected Results and Implication of Results
Obviously you do not have results at the proposal stage. However, you need to have some idea about what kind of data you will be collecting, and what methods will be used in order to answer your research question or test your hypothesis. You should also state the contribution expected from your research efforts.
9. Tentative Thesis Chapter Outline
Present the chapter outline as a draft contents page with brief annotations of expected content or stages will help you in thinking through the process and outcome of your research. Follow the standard sections relevant to your type of research. Look at past theses in your area and discuss your ideas with your supervisor.
10. List of References
This list is desirable only if the proposal contains six or more references. Otherwise, the references can be inserted in the text within parentheses, i.e.
(Morita, Y [1996], Spring torrents: The catastrophic effects of corn snow meltdown. European Ski Journal, 5, 141-162). (Note that brackets, not parentheses, are used within parentheses.)
The style and format of the references depend on the disciplinary field. The main consideration is consistency; whatever style is chosen should be followed scrupulously throughout. (Please see IV(1)(v) below.)
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