About writing a solutions section: In this section, you will explain existing interventions to address the health issue. Interventions may include programs and/or policies–not high level generalizations but those that can be put into practice at the local level (i.e. they were implemented elsewhere and have been found to be effective). You should summarize current interventions and evidence in concrete ways (7-8 pages). These are real, tangible, specific interventions that are practical to implement in the real world. They must have data behind them. (That is why we focused on finding experiments/studies when we were looking for articles-you wouldn’t want to reach this point and find that you don’t have what you need to write the solutions section.)
Make sure you use APA headings and subheadings so that your document is easy to follow. Content will be placed under appropriate headings and subheadings. About APA headings: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/headingsLinks to an external site.. That will be discussed in more detail later in this document.
You will provide evidence that supports the solutions you recommend. You will do this by describing studies. You will not describe the studies for their own sake but rather you will draw from them and describe them so readers can determine the strength of the evidence in support of your recommendations. Organize by theme, not by article or author. Don’t, for instance, have a paragraph or two that describes what an author named Garcia said and then another paragraph or two that describes what an author named Jones said. If, for instance, you are describing three diets (i.e. the Mediterranean diet, the MIND diet) that may reduce the odds of dementia, you would have a section for each of those diets. If you were explaining exercise interventions, maybe one section would explain interventions that take place face-to-face while another section would describe those that take place virtually. These would have headings so the reader could follow the organization and structure of your document. Make things easy for your readers to follow. First introduce your recommendation and then provide the evidence (study) that provides that evidence.
When you provide evidence, make sure you explain research-based terminology that you are using. Do not use the same terms that researchers did without knowing what they mean. It is essential that you fully understand an article before you write about it — otherwise it is very easy to say the exact opposite of what the researchers were saying. I do check for this — meaning I do go back and look at the source articles — because academic readers do, as well. Be careful not to lose credibility by unintentionally misrepresenting what researchers said. The document ‘writing that would get the grade of A’ provides an example of how to describe a study (again, first make clear to your readers why you are presenting that study/what the recommendation is). You are not looking for ‘expert’ opinion that ____ would work. Nor are you looking for overall summaries that you might find in a meta analysis. You are looking for evidence gained through studies in which the experimenters tested an intervention and obtained data that were analyzed and show that the intervention works. (“Data,” by the way, is plural, so it’s ‘data are.’ “Datum” is singular but it is unlikely that you will use that word.)
Do not provide solutions in the form of generalizations such as “we must be concerned with this population” or “policymakers must ensure the wellbeing of ____.” We want specific, real-world, practical solutions that are feasible to implement in day-to-day practice. The solutions are not idealistic or hypothetical in nature and should not be presented in the form of imperatives. Do not tell readers that it is ‘important’ to address something. Provide the nuts and bolts, the ‘how to.’ Imagine that you are a manager of the division of a public health department. You would want to know specifically what to do or implement. If your aim is to have your population exercise more, it won’t help if someone just tells you that it is important to get your population to exercise. But it might help if someone can tell you that pairing people with exercise buddies who contact each other once a week has been shown to increase the amount of exercise that people do.
Make sure your solution does not consist in giving something away for free or educating or training people in general — unless you have a research-based, specific approach for that education, training, etc. For instance, you would not propose that we “educating college students about the hazards of excess drinking.” That is a generalization that does not help. Remember that education alone seldom changes behavior. However, the social norms approach — an approach in which communication campaigns let students know the actual amount that their peers drink — has been shown to be effective. That is because students who drink a lot often do so to match what they believe their peers drink — but they also overestimate how much their peers drink. Explaining this in a scholarly fashion and defending it via peer-reviewed studies would work. But a general call for education would not work.
In general, your paper will likely explain at least three interventions. Make sure that you do not merely name a particular program, such as ‘the healthy choices’ program. Your readers will not have any idea what that means and they will not refer to your source article to find it out. Tell us the specific approach that is being taken, keeping in mind that your readers in this class will want to know what to do if they implement an intervention. So, you wouldn’t say that some researchers implemented an ‘it’s time’ program to increase the step count of sedentary adults. You might explain, though, that researchers sent text messages to participants both fifteen minutes before exercise was to begin and again at the start time of the exercise. In this way, your own readers in this course will get the idea that the program involves sending two text messages, one just before exercise time and another when exercise time begins. Once your readers know this, they can implement that solution in their own future programs. You are not writing for me. You are writing for other readers in this class and they will be implementing programs in the future (if they are not already). Do not underestimate the value and importance of what you are doing. Being specific will help ensure that there are real results after all your hard work.
Remember that your paper must be well organized. Use APA-style subheadings to clearly set off different sections of your paper (such as different categories of solutions). It is difficult to give generalizations here because each person’s paper will be different. If someone was writing a paper about how to use exercise to decrease falls among the elderly, they might have one section for yoga, another for Tai Chi, and another for Pilates (if those were the three forms of exercise that have the most evidence behind them). The writer would not mix up these three forms throughout the paper but rather would logically group them under their own headers so the reader could follow the flow of the paper. The writer would probably use just one sentence when introducing the paper and explain that three forms of exercise will be described: Tai Chi, Pilates, and yoga.
If these are being presented so that the form of exercise with the most evidence behind it is being presented first, the writer will say so. If you have questions about this (or any part of your paper) be sure to let me know. Notice how this does not claim that exercise in general is a solution. Instead, the writer will explain how each of these specificforms in turn is a solution; that is, the writer will explain how Tai Chi works — probably by explaining that the practice of Tai Chi helps adults get a sense of where they are in relation to other objects. But, the writer would not use the term ‘proprioception’ without explaining that it refers to an awareness of where one’s body is in space. I hope this helps to illustrate how you will probably need to define some terms for readers in this class. But, your paper should not be so technical that the reader has to learn lots of new vocabulary and keep referring back to definitions in order to make sense of your paper. We are not writing at that level in this class.
Remember that you must have the sharing settings done correctly (ensuring that I can both view and edit your document). Otherwise you will not be able to earn points.
Use the conventions for writers documentLinks to an external site. as a checklist when you are revising your work (before you submit). Check that you have avoided say-nothing sentences, generalizations, feel-good sentences, overpromises, anecdotes, assumptions, and filler sentences of all kinds. These well may be present in early drafts but you will want to edit them out before submitting your final version. In Part II (Innovations & Solutions), you will write about what can be done to prevent and treat the issue
What programs/interventions/policies already exist?
What evaluations exist of these interventions?
What evidence is available to show that prevention/treatment works?
Introduce topic briefly and state purpose of this paper
Prevention: Programs
(summarize programs, provide evidence of effectiveness, identify gaps)
Prevention: Policies
(summarize policies, provide evidence of effectiveness, identify gaps)
Treatment: Programs
(summarize programs, provide evidence of effectiveness, identify gaps)
Treatment: Policies
(summarize policies, provide evidence of effectiveness, identify gaps)
Summary of Interventions & Solutions
What do you know?
What don’t we know?
What are weaknesses/strengths overall
Where should future research focus
What is the takeaway message
There might be differences in prevention & treatment for different groups
(e.g., adults v. children; immigrants v. native-born)
There might be different levels of prevention and treatment (primary, secondary, tertiary)
Your paper structure should make sense for your topic!!
You must be specific about evidence. How do we know
something works or is promising? I would expect to see descriptions of populations studied, sample sizes, and
effect sizes.