Conduct a literature review. You will utilize the PICO research question that you submitted previously. You must report on 10 different peer reviewed journal articles that highlight findings on the intervention that you selected. Find 10 articles that answer your research question (you received feedback on the mini assignment where you had to submit your references) and put together a cohesive review that answers your question utilizing the findings. The paper should be 5 pages, double spaced, 12-point font. For the literature review section (paragraphs 3-7), each paragraph should present data from a at least two articles that provide data on the effects of the intervention.
Sample format:
Introduction (Paragraph 1): Talk about your health outcome. What causes this condition/disease? What are the available treatments? End with your research question and your hypothesis. Provide data that supports why this question is important to explore. Tell me what you hope to accomplish by studying this question, i.e. what is the impact of the intervention you are looking at on the health of your target population? How would health outcomes change with the wider implementation of this intervention (assuming the intervention is effective)?
Background (Paragraph 2): You must tell me the state of your population: this is where you explain the gravitas. What is the disease morbidity and/or mortality? How many people in the U.S. population have the disease? What is the economic toll on the healthcare system? Is it a preventable disease? What do the experts say and recommend? This should land you directly on the intervention you chose. If there is overlap between your introduction and this background, cut the repetition out. These paragraphs should flow one into the other. Look at your articles for examples.
Body (Paragraphs 3-7): Make your argument utilizing data from the 10 articles. Each paragraph should start with a sentence that transitions from the last sentence in your previous paragraph to what you are about to talk about. You want to make sure that you highlight the findings of the studies and refrain from summarizing the way the studies were conducted (no descriptions of study design, sampling, or participant characteristics!). I do not want 5 pages on how they recruited participants, how many, in what cities, how many questions were on the surveys, etc. I want to know about the intervention – how was it designed and what was it designed to do and did it work? For most epidemiological studies, you will be interpreting the Table 2 and possibly Table 3 findings (refer to feedback on mini assignments). You have to tell me what they found between the treatment and comparison groups that indicates if their intervention was successful. I often tell students to put all 10 articles on the floor and organize them by trends – you may find that 2-3 of the interventions overlap on certain components (e.g. these physical activity interventions were conducted in schools whereas these were conducted in local parks, so you organize two paragraphs with those subtitles “School-based Interventions” and “Park-based Interventions” – you are crafting a story and you can be creative, but you have to find those trends in your data and organize your data into a cohesive “narrative”).
Conclusion (Paragraphs 8-9): Tell me the answer to your research question after presenting scientific findings on your intervention. Is there additional research that needs to be conducted to answer your question? What did you learn? What are some future directions for researchers? How would you utilize what you found as a Director of a Program related to your health outcome? What were the gaps in the research? If you were to propose an intervention now based on what you’ve learned, describe it and why it would be effective (based on the literature – cite the articles).
Your reference page and charts and tables do not count towards the 5-page minimum requirement. Cover pages also do not count towards the page limit. Make sure you have 5 full pages and not 4.25, 4.5, etc. A paragraph is 5-7 sentences, but you must fill 5 pages so make sure that are strategic and thoughtful about your writing. You should have a minimum of 10 references, but you should have more than 10 because of the information that you included in your intro, background, and conclusion. You need 10 just for the literature review section.