Article Summary Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is for EVERYONE in your group to become familiar with interventions which have addressed your chosen health behavior and/or health problem in your target population. Very rarely are there any completely novel interventions in health promotion. Rather, health promotion specialists will take existing components of previous interventions and change various aspects of them such as the sequence, dose, multiplicity, etc., or combine components from several different (previous) interventions to create a new one.

For the article summary assignment, EACH person in the group must perform a literature review, searching for any existing programs or interventional studies that have shown promise to address the health behavior and/or health problem effectively in your target population. Each individual in the group must locate DIFFERENT articles for this assignment. NO duplicate articles will be accepted. If everyone does this correctly, there will be 10+ usable articles found which may be used in the final program plan. By requiring EACH member to become familiar with the literature the group will be able to better formulate possible intervention strategies/activities/components for your program.

What you are looking for are behavior principles/constructs, models & theories, community enhancements, system changes, laws, etc., that have been effective in targeting your chosen pop/beh/prob. The most helpful articles will be best practices articles, meta-analysis, systematic reviews, evidenced-based programs/reviews, and/or position papers.

HINT: While you’re out there looking for good articles for this assignment, grab others that will be helpful for your program plan. Remember you will need to justify/support EACH objective for your program with research/literature.

Although the group should find far more than two articles which should be helpful for the program plan project, for the purposes of this assignment, EACH individual group member needs to turn in articles summaries for two (2) articles.

The article summary itself is pretty simple. For each article, I need (1) a basic summary (what the article was about, the sample, the methodology, the findings, etc.); (2) How the article applies to your program plan, target population, target behavior, and/or health problem (e.g. how/why this article is useful to you in the planning of your intervention program); (3) Specific information from the article that you think will be helpful and/or used in your program plan; and (4) a copy of the article. PLEASE NOTE: Simply saying something like “This article applies to our chosen behavior because it looked at ‘X’ and our program is looking at ‘X’” is NOT, NOT, NOT and NEVER WILL be appropriate! Automatic 0 if I see that kind of nonsense. Automatic 0 for group members who have duplicate articles. See attached example article summary with my notes in it for guidance.