Health Infographic Project
Step 3: Identify the health behavior
In this part of the assignment, you need to identify your health behavior or what behavior you want to change in order to address the health problem identified in Step 1. Start by doing some background research on your particular health problem in terms of what behaviors you might want to change. You need to research behaviors related to your specific health problem. I suggest starting with a simple google search like behavioral causes of X. From here, you will likely be able to identify more scientific sources that support your specific health behavior.
When thinking about your health behavior, you need to think about your target population. The behavior needs to be related to your target population. Think about what your specific target population can do (or not do) to prevent the development of your health problem. It may help to look at your answer to question #5 in Step 2.
Example: In the example described above, my health problem was infant mortality. After doing research, we found out that there are multiple behaviors related to infant mortality (prenatal and postnatal deaths). All of these behaviors are known factors that increase the likelihood of an infant death: poor prenatal health care, incorrect infant sleeping position, alcohol and other drug abuse, and diet. I found out that young African-American women (Step 2) were more likely to have infant death (Step 1) because they did not have access to adequate prenatal health care. I then did a focus groups with young African-American pregnant women to discover the behavioral obstacles related to receiving prenatal health care. I found out that women would not access Medicaid because there was a myth that this would cause the state to pursue the father for child support. Thus, I decided to attempt to change the health behavior of accessing Medicaid benefits through informing them that this was just a myth (Step 3).
Be careful in identifying your behavior. Your behavior needs to be very specific. This is because the infographic that you develop to change the behavior is going to be based on which behavior you choose. If your behavior is broad, the infographic will be very difficult to create. The narrower the behavior, the better the infographic.
Also, pick something that is a behavior or something that you do. For example, feel happy is an emotion; not a behavior.
**Remember your overall focus is to select a behavior that you want your target population to do or refrain from doing to decrease the likelihood that they will develop your identified health problem.
Instructions for completing the paper:
After you have decided on the specific health behavior that you want to change, write an ESSAY (including an introduction and conclusion) that describes the behavior and why you chose this behavior. Provide at least two references in the information that answers the questions below.
In your description, you should include the following information:
1. Briefly restate your health problem and target population.
2. Describe the specific behavior you want your target population to do or refrain from doing in order to reduce the chance of having the health problem identified in Step 1. Answer the question, What behavior is related to my health problem?
3. Explain how this behavior is related to the health problem identified in Step 1.
4. Explain why people practice this behavior or why they refrain from the behavior. If the behavior is something that you want your target population to do, you need to answer the question, Why doesnt my target population practice this behavior? If the behavior is something that you want the target population to refrain from doing, you need to answer the question, Why does my target population do this behavior?
5. Provide a specific statement explaining why you picked this behavior.
Helpful Tips:
· This part of the assignment should only address the health behavior that you want to change. Do not discuss how you will change this behavior. Do not describe the infographic. You will do this in Step 4.
· Make sure that your behavior is related to health problem identified in Step 1 and to the target population identified in Step 2. Why one group of people do something could be completely different than why another group of people do that same thing.
· Make sure that the behavior is something that you do. It needs to be a behavior.
· Be sure to provide at least two references that supports the information provided in the above questions. Do not forget to include in-text citations and a reference list to document your citations. Both of these should be written using APA formatting.
· Remember you may have no more than ONE sentence that is a direct quote. Papers with two or more direct quotes/sentences will receive a grade of 0. This means that your ENTIRE paper/assignment may have no more than one sentence that is copied from a source. A direct quote is generally three or more words copied from another source.
Step 4 Creating the Infographic
In this part of the assignment you are going to create the infographic that you would like for your target population to read in hopes of changing their health behavior. You are going to combine the information that you collected in Steps 1, 2, and 3 and use this to create your infographic.
For this assignment, you are going to submit the actual infographic and your answers to several questions about the infographic. This part of the assignment may be written in question and answer format.
There are a couple of ways to create the infographic. You can hand draw the infographic and then scan the final product into a document. My preference is for you to use one of the many free online websites for the creation of a digital infographic. My recommendation is to use Canva located at www.canva.com. You may use Power Point as well, but I do not recommend it. If using Power Point you may only have a maximum of two slides.
An infographic is visual image used to represent information. Infographics are typically pictures, drawings, charts, diagrams, etc. with the use of limited text. Your infographic should be 1 2 small pages (think brochure size) that are mostly images and some text. Keep in mind that you want to create something that your target audience will actually read. Therefore, it should be short and to the point. Heres a helpful video on creating infographics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQXf_d5Mgjg
Information to be included in the infographic:
1) Provide a brief description of the health problem.
2) Provide a brief description of the health behavior that you want the population to practice or refrain from practicing.
3) Explain the benefits of practicing the behavior or refraining from practicing the behavior. Think about individual benefits as well as benefits to society at-large.
4) Explain how to minimize any of the drawbacks from practicing the behavior or refraining from the behavior. For example, if you want the population to exercise, how can you make it easier for your population to exercise?
5) Make sure that your infographic will be likely to change the desired health behavior. This may mean that you need to include other information, make it visually appealing, make it easily understandable.
Note: Page 46 of the text has a chart on characteristics that make health communication more effective. (Table 3.3)
When you are creating your infographic you need to think about why your target population (Step 2) does not already do this behavior (or why do they do it) and what will make them change their behavior. You may want to go back and look at the theories of behavior change discussed in Module 4.
Questions to answer about your infographic:
1. Why do you think this infographic will work to change the health behavior of your target population? Think about the theories of behavior change.
2. Explain how the infographic and resulting behavior change will benefit the larger community.
Helpful Hints:
· Do not just list the symptoms, causes, and treatment of the health problem. This is boring. No one will read it, and certainly no one is going to change their behavior by such a bland infographic.
· Consider what will appeal to your target population. Think about what will make your target population change their behavior.
· Make sure that all of the steps in the project are related to one another. You need to create an infographic that will change the behavior (Step 3) of your target population (Step 2) in order to reduce the likelihood that they will have the health problem you identified in Step 1.
