Author: Estephany Hinojosa

This piece is a research brief produced by Brian G. Smith and Staci B. Smith. Brian is a professor of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation, & Pediatrics, & Nursing at Yale university, while Staci is a graduate student at Purdue University. Brian G. Smith clearly must know what he’s talking about, right?

The authors of this text are looking at how social media can be used as a tool to increase public health awareness in society. However, they explore how this can be limited because people who are of low-income do not necessarily have as much access to wifi, computers, phones – all of which are main drivers of social media.

Additionally, the authors bring up the idea of social media engagement and how it is effective through absorption, self-expression and representation, empowerment and interactivity.

All in all, I think that this text is very thorough. After all, it is 17 pages long, and of those 17, four are just references. However, I think that since the test is so long, it is geared toward a more academic and scholarly audience.

This piece is a research brief by authors Alison Klebanoff Cohen, and S. Leonard Syme. Cohen is a research assistant at UC Berkley, while Syme is a professor of epidemiology and community health. In this text, the authors are exploring the ways in which education and health come together. They do this by looking at different levels of education, such as elementary, middle school, high school, and even college.

Through their review of various texts, the authors found that elementary school is extremely important to a person’s development, both in the classroom and out. They also found that being in school programs such as Head Start can result in crucial improvement of a person’s literacy. Additionally, they found that smaller class sizes positively improve students’ learning – which I could have told you myself! I find it interesting how they also found that having a bachelor’s degree is associated with better health outcomes. It’s interesting because I’ve never thought about it that way even though I know it’s true. Having a bachelor’s degree means better job prospects and more money, which means a person is more likely to have good health care services and not live in an urban area which often results in less sanitary living conditions.

Overall, this research brief was interesting and well done. I think that the format of it is very good, but I wish that they would have looked at poor students who do not have access to programs such as Head Start, and how not having that impacts their health.

Hinojosa WRT Unit 3 Draft

*Work with sources in your draft so that she can give you good feedback

*If you’re using data/numbers, maybe a chart would be better

Two tips for writing for the public:
– Don’t have footnotes/reference page
-Citations are an academic feature, not a writing for the public feature
– Ways to do this:
-“Recent research on the subject, by scholars at ____,”
– “According to the ____”

– Don’t use acronyms
-people don’t know what they mean
-Some acronyms have multiple meanings

-Things that impact whether you’ll read something:
-The length
-Layout
-Can you skim it?
-Language
-Can I understand it?
For Wednesday:
-Chapter 5 of “ReWritting”
-Post draft to class blog by start of class
-Peer review in class
-As an attachment
-Include a quick explanation of retorical situation (audience, publication, etc.)
-Include where youre at in the process (almost done? early draft?)
-Include if theres something that u really want the reviewer to help you with
-Bring laptops

For my final paper, I am planning on examining how volunteering can have positive effects on elderly populations. As one gets older, it is easy to feel as though there is no longer a purpose in your life. When you don’t have anything to do everyday, your home and minor hobbies get you through the day. However, if a person can find a daily/weekly/monthly volunteer event, it might make the difference between depression and a better life.

The audience of this piece would elderly citizens themselves, different community organizations who need more volunteers, family of elderly citizens, and doctors of elderly citizens. While I have only stated a few, this piece can be useful for many people and many educational fields of study, such as: sociology, aging studies, and psychology. For my paper, I will be focusing in on elderly citizens and their family members as my target audience.

I see my piece being less of a formal paper, and more of something that can be accessible and read by anyone. I am planning on using mainly scholarly sources, but I want to translate and use these sources in a way that people who normally won’t have access to these sources, can now have that information at their hands. In order to do this, I will draw from the quiz we took, and keep in mind that I can’t use certain scholarly words and instead should use everyday jargon. Additionally, I will draw from the readings we’ve done, in remaining aware of who I want to read my piece.

After watching A Place at the Table, I feel as though I personally became more passionate about the war of food justice in America. The directors of the documentary were mindful in their use of research. They employed a lot of first-hand stories that were jam packed with pathos. Whenever one of those individuals would make a claim, their statement was backed up by a scholar. Additionally, they included various statistics on the millions of people affected by food insecurities. The way they included these statistics was even more helpful, because they were turned into short and colorful animated clips.

One of the stories that touched me was of a woman from Mississippi who was a chef at a local restaurant. That restaurant mainly served fried food, made with a lot of cholesterol and oil. The story touched me because in my culture, a lot of the food we make is fried and unhealthy. What made this story more appalling is the fact that before this story was told, authors presented statistics saying that Mississippi is the city with the highest rates of obesity and food insecurity.

Another strong suit of the documentary is the fact that it follows one woman throughout her journey to being food secure. Not only did this strategy help the audience understand the severity of the issue, but it also touched the audience because the woman never truly became food secure, and instead faced one issue after the next.

Overall, the producers of this documentary were very intentional in their use of research. They employed both scholarly and non-scholarly sources, and they had first-hand stories which added to their logos and pathos.

Why do people write research briefs?
– Summary
– Usually pretty dense
– To make scholarly material accessible to a larger audience (b/c not everyone has the resources to read these scholarly articles)

How does “Engaging Health:
Health Research and Policymaking in the Social Media Sphere” do this?
– The author followed ‘the public health model’
– A lot of definitions
– There are important things in bold
– They highlight the key findings of the report
– Delve deeply in explaining what each concept meant
– Written for a person who did not do any of the research, so they build it from the ground up
– The ‘key findings’ are presented in such a way that each paragraph following it describes the points
– The introduction is very explicit and clear on what the text is about ‘the purpose of this paper is…’
– Introduction includes rhetorical questions

Class Notes:
– An abstract is the piece of text that tells the reader if the text is worth their time to read
– An executive summary is common in fields other than academia… where ppl need info quickly but they don’t have time to go do all the research… so they use research briefs
– Research briefs are commonly written for decision makers who are going to do something based on the info in that brief
– Research briefs are sometimes called policy briefs.
– Readers usually don’t read scholarly articles in their entirety, so you need to make sure your research brief is good and concise.
– Having a brief that is aesthetically pleasing is helpful in having your reader actually read the whole thing
– There’s an expectation for what should be in your brief and even the order it’s in

Structure:
What’s the issue?
What’s the background?
What are the key findings?
What are the implications?

FOR TONIGHT (3/2):
– Quotation sandwich
– Article notes

FOR MONDAY (3/7):
– Printed Research Brief draft
– Printed scholarly article

I’m interested in where these issues/conversations bump into each other:
Elderly lives and what keeps them going and the intersections that race and class have with the two.

Here is an article I’ve found at this intersection (include title, author, place of publication, not just a url): “The Relationship Between Spiritual Well-Being and Quality of Life Among Elderly People,” Ali, Marhemat, Sara, & Hamid, 2015, in Holistic Nursing Practice, May/June 2015.

Here’s how research is working in this article (using Harris’s terminology): This article is a description and presentation of a study. Thus, there is research at play throughout this entire piece. Apart from the visual research portrayed through the graphs and tables, there is also the written research descriptions and assessments throughout the piece. Ali, et al, relies heavily on numbers to show to the reader that the conclusions they are drawing are statistically correct and cannot be disproven unless their research methods were faulty. Based on the heavy use of numbers, I am inclined to believe that the authors are writing this piece for a more academic and scholarly audience, because the average person does not know what all these numbers mean in context to the study. Thus, while this article may be heavy on numbers, it is not exactly an article that would get me closer to finding out what I need to know/writing my Unit 2 paper.

This advertisement is going against teen pregnancy by saying that having a child at an early age will increase your child’s likelihood of dropping out of high school.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/03/27/opinion/27conversation-img/27conversation-img-blog427.jpg

Secondly, this video advertisement is calling for parents to promote a healthy lifestyle for their children from the time they are babies. The sooner the better, because then they won’t develop poor eating habits.

Growing up in the Bronx, NY I have witnessed first-hand and have even experienced what it is like to be on Welfare – specifically Medicaid. Harrington Meyer’s piece on Medicare use among the elderly, (http://gas.sagepub.com/content/8/1/8.full.pdf), examines data on what characteristics lead to Medicaid use, specifically looking at income, gender, race, class, education and marital status. I was surprised to read that elderly people in nursing homes are more 6.5 times more likely to receive Medicaid. I thought that since they lived in somewhat secluded areas, with most of their needs met, they would not need Medicaid – however, I was wrong. In contrast, I was not surprised to read that women of color are more likely to be on Welfare than their counterparts. Yet, I was surprised that this fact was true regardless of income.

Another article I looked at was Lowenstein’s “Nursing homes serving minorities offering less care than those housing white” (2015) [http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/11/17/16275/nursing-homes-serving-minorities-offering-less-care-those-housing-whites]. As the title suggests, this article zeros in on the difference between the care received by whites and people of color in nursing homes. An interesting fact pointed out by this article is that Nursing Home Compare, a source that is widely used, is reporting statistics that contradict what is actually happening in nursing homes caring to largely black and Latino populations. For one, they reported that registered nurses spent more time with patients than they actually did, which affects the quality experienced by a patient.

These articles are decades apart, yet they both demonstrate vast differences among Americans depending on their gender, race, and income levels. These texts further prove that America has a ways to go before being able to provide an equal playing field for both whites, people of color, the rich and the poor.