Answer 3 for NURS 8310 Week 2 Discussion: Descriptive Epidemiology
Descriptive epidemiology is important as it helps healthcare professionals to understand a particular condition or disease comprehensively, which then enables or supports better management strategies (Fox et al.,2022). Therefore, this discussion focuses on obesity among children. It is important to describe the problem using the epidemiological model. In terms of person, children from particular demographic groups can be impacted more by obesity; for instance, those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to be affected by obesity (Vazquez & Cubbin, 2020). Behavioral aspects such as lack of physical activity, poor diet, and sedentary behaviors can enhance obesity development in children. In terms of place, the rates of obesity among children are usually higher in urban areas as compared to rural areas due to factors such as access to safe places for physical activity and healthy food options. Recent research has also shown that childhood obesity has steadily increased in the past decades.
Primary data can be key to describing and studying obesity in children. Therefore, it is important to use appropriate sampling methods. One of the sampling methods that can be used is stratified random sampling, where the population of focus, which in this case are children, will be divided into strata based on various characteristics such as socioeconomic status, gender, and age. The process is then followed by randomly selecting a sample from each subgroup (Berndt, 2020).
Secondary data sources can play a key role when studying this problem. One of them is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which assesses nutritional status and health among children and includes comprehensive data on aspects such as obesity (Stierman et al.,2021). School-based health surveys can also be used since they capture important information on school-going children. The methods and sources can influence the completeness of case identification and case definition or diagnostics used. For example, the information in NHANES is comprehensive and nationally represents a sample of children. As such using this source ensures completeness of case identification. It also offers standards such as BMI, which can be used by researchers to ensure diagnostic consistency.
References
Berndt, A. E. (2020). Sampling methods. Journal of Human Lactation, 36(2), 224-226. https://doi.org/10.1177/0890334420906850
Fox, M. P., Murray, E. J., Lesko, C. R., & Sealy-Jefferson, S. (2022). On the need to revitalize descriptive epidemiology. American Journal of Epidemiology, 191(7), 1174-1179. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwac056
Stierman, B., Afful, J., Carroll, M. D., Chen, T. C., Davy, O., Fink, S., … & Akinbami, L. J. (2021). National health and nutrition examination survey 2017–March 2020 prepandemic data files development of files and prevalence estimates for selected health outcomes. http://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc:106273
Vazquez, C. E., & Cubbin, C. (2020). Socioeconomic status and childhood obesity: a review of literature from the past decade to inform intervention research. Current Obesity Reports, 9, 562-570. Doi: 10.1007/s13679-020-00400-2
