Overall reflection of area 4:

There have been multiple times during my MPH program at EMU that I showed competency in area 4. I possess the knowledge and skill set necessary to conduct research and evaluation regarding health education, demonstrated by the successful development of plans to facilitate research and evaluations, and the successful execution of plans. Though much of area 4 is advanced level competencies, I believe I have a great start with my experience in these areas, as noted in the reflection below as well as on my project page, and look forward to being a part of research and evaluation in the future. 

Artifact: College Students and Cannabis 

Artifact Description

In HLED 677 Research, Theory & Design in Health & Human Performance, I had the opportunity to work as part of a collaborative research team (2 other graduate students) in the design and implementation of a research project. This artifact is the PowerPoint presentation that was created as a result of our effort. My group designed and conducted a study that included data collection, analysis, and presentation of results. As social structure changes around acceptable use of cannabis, I was very interested in what my peers as college students thought about its use. My group approved of the topic, and helped me complete this project. 

Health Education Competencies 

We created the project title “College students and Cannabis”, purpose statement “gather data regarding college-aged student’s knowledge and perceptions related to cannabis, the use of cannabis, and the perceived benefits, or detriments, associated with cannabis”(4.1.1), and hypotheses “we believe that the results of the student survey will depict a positive perception, and mindset, towards cannabis (and its usage) in the minds of the college-aged population.” From there, we determined our target population (graduate students), study procedures including research design (analytical) (4.1.7), assessed the available resources to conduct the evaluation (time, technology, target population accessibility)(4.1.5), developed our data collection instrument (online survey) as well as the types of data that we wanted to collect (qualitative, categorical) (4.1.6), created and performed data analysis plan (4.1.8, 4.1.9), and finally presented our findings via a PowerPoint presentation. I developed an online survey with 12 questions that were related to the research purpose, two questions were gathering categorical data, where the next ten questions are in the form of an altered 1-5 response Likert-Scale, looking to quantify the attitudes towards cannabis exhibited by the participants (4.1.2). Throughout this process, our group was dedicated to maintaining ethical principles in the evaluation process by developing an informed consent and limited any possible risk to our participants. 

 Summary

This project was a complete joy for me to be a part of. I was lead investigator, so I was given the opportunity to steer the project in the direction of my passion, and had a wonderfully supportive team that was eager to gain experience and run a successful research evaluation. I was able to work with my team members to determine their strengths and weaknesses, areas of interest and improvement, and divide the work in a way that we all felt successful and were also able to learn something new. This gave me great experience working with a team and taking a leadership role.