Using data to drive decisions about public health policy

Respond to the following question: “What are the positives, challenges, and limitations when using data to drive decisions about public health policy and resulting interventions?”

This assignment should be no more than three pages. References used must be cited using APA Editorial Format.

“Statistics for Public Health” discusses the role of biostatistics as well as understanding how variance is explained in statistics. This article critically analyzes the multiple quantitative methods used in analysis.

Dr. Williams’ article on how to effectively create a questionnaire captures the behavior of individuals. He breaks this out into 9 stages:

1.Define your research question and study population

2.Decide how the questionnaire will be administered

3.Formulate your questions

4.Formulate your responses

5.Design the layout

6.Pre-pilot the questions and layout

7.Pilot study

8.Design a coding scheme

9.Print questionnaire

The reading on health status assessment, offers an opportunity to look at how quantitative data analysis is used in a community and the impact of the findings on decisions made.

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.