Illegal drug use Assignment 3

“What is your household income?”

How did you respond to this question? If you have never encountered this question, consider how you might respond to such a personal inquiry.

Many sensitive subjects exist in public health research that people might have difficulty discussing. The likelihood of obtaining accurate and reliable information often depends upon how a question is asked. This is especially true for sensitive topics, such as income, sexual behavior, illegal drug use, and intimate partner violence.

For this Discussion, think about sensitive information you might need to gather through a survey. Consider how you would develop survey questions appropriate for eliciting responses from potentially reluctant participants.

With these thoughts in mind:

Post a description of a research topic that would involve the gathering of sensitive information. Then, construct three survey questions that you might use to gather this sensitive information. Identify the study population you have chosen and explain your rationale for how the survey questions are constructed. Explain potential challenges to accurate and reliable data collection of sensitive information from this population. Finally, explain how you might operationalize and measure the variables collected by the survey questions you have constructed.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.