Community Health Assessments: Examining the Health Status Indicators of a Particular Population

Community health assessment involves systematically examining the health status indicators of a particular population with the aim of identifying the key problems prevailing in a community. In research, the ultimate goal of a community health assessment exercise is to develop the strategies that can be employed in addressing the community’s healthcare needs as well as identified issues. Ultimately, this aids in the attainment of an improved health and wellness status for the targeted community members. The purpose of this assessment is to identify the factors that affect the health of the community and then recognize available resources within the community to address such factors by creating a community health assessment. During the execution of the research, an assessment team of nine persons will be recruited to determine the healthcare issues affecting cash crop farmers in the identified community. Additionally, the members of the assessment team will be residents of the community where the targeted research population of farmers originates. Moreover, the choice of the assessment team will be based on the reason that they will have a deeper understanding of the healthcare issues that affect farmers as a result of using pesticides for cash crop farming. Also, the assessment team will be in a position to connect easily with the targeted population, a factor that will greatly promote the collection of data. Qualitative data will be collected using the questionnaire method during the execution of the project. Additionally, the questionnaires are a list of written questions employed to gather information from the targeted population (Achari, 2014; December 2014). In this case, the questionnaires offered to the respondents will be unstructured and it will contain a list of nine research questions. Ultimately, the choice of these methods of data collection was based on the reason that they are cheap to implement and administer to the targeted population (Ponto, 2015). Additionally, questionnaires can collect a large scale of information from the targeted population within a short timeline. The data analysis technique that will be employed for the analysis of the research data will be the content analysis method. Additionally, content analysis involves categorizing verbal as well as behavioral data with the primary aim of classifying, summarizing as well as tabulating the collected information (Krippendorff, 2013). Moreover, there are several advantages that will be attained if the coding analysis technique will be employed in providing information pertaining to the diseases affecting the targeted cash crops farmers. First, the method provides a deep insight into the complex model of the targeted sample population’s thoughts. Also, code analysis is also an unobtrusive method of analyzing data interpretations. Furthermore, the data will be interpreted by a team of six data analysts who will be appointed prior to the beginning of the research. Ultimately, the data analysis and interpretation process will take a period of six weeks, and there will be sufficient financial resources to cater to their financial obligations. The findings of the research will be issued to the targeted audience in six weeks after the data analysis and interpretation period has elapsed. Additionally, this period will be sufficient to accommodate any revision of the analyzed data that may be required by the data analysts. Also, this will be important in ensuring that only the correct findings of the research will be reported. Ultimately, the findings of the research will be disseminated through local farming publications like magazines and newspapers. The research process will take a period of 24 weeks to be completed. Additionally, the activities that will be executed during this period have been summarized in the chart below.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, a community health assessment involves systematically examining the health status indicators of a particular population with the aim of identifying the key problems prevailing in a community. In this research, an assessment team of nine persons will be recruited to determine the healthcare issues affecting cash crop farmers in the identified community. Also, the qualitative data will be collected using questionnaires during the execution of the project. Also, the code analysis technique will be employed in the analysis of data and a team of six data analysts will be used to interpret the collected data findings. Ultimately, the findings of the research attained will be disseminated through local farming publications like magazines and newspapers. 

References  

Achari, P. D. (2014). Research Methodology. Traverse City: Horizon Books. 

Denscombe, M. (2014). The Good Research Guide: For Small-Scale Social Research Projects. London: McGraw-Hill Education (UK). 

Krippendorff, K. (2013). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. 

Ponto, J. (2015). Understanding and Evaluating Survey Research. Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology, 6 (2), 168–171.