Assignment-PUB 655- TOPIC 5- Participatory Learning and Action Tools
VERY IMPORTANT-Details
1. -Please select and practice one of the participatory learning and action tools from the question. You can select either- Appreciative inquiry interview OR Holistic worldview analysis. I want to leave that to the writer’s choice.
2. I work as a Public Health Nurse in case you want to use the job- for the group identified in the question.
-Please read the question page in details.
-Details of the question and the rubric are also uploaded
-Please read the Rubric before you start
-Please include the Introduction, Thesis statement, and conclusion in the paper.
– Include section headings for each section component where needed
– Sources must be published within the last 5 years. It must be from 2017 and after
– Sources must be appropriate for the assignment criteria and public health content.
– Please do not use blogs as references
-References should be in APA 7th ed.
-Add references to reference page
-Add the hyperlink for each reference in APA 7th edition format.
Thank you
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Solution
Participatory Learning and Action Tool
PLA is an action approach used in research to draw essential ideas and perspectives of stakeholders’ involvement. The action tool encourages stakeholders’ engagement towards achieving the stipulated objectives. Therefore, it is a practical research technique with different stakeholders having world view perspectives and may involve the existence of power and require balancing (de Brún et al., 2017). Its main principle validates the reversal of the stakeholders’ involvement to research as beneficiaries to direct collaborators and partners. This study reviews the Appreciative Inquiry Interview PLA tool, participants involved, cultural insights learnt from the chosen participants, challenges encountered in facilitating the tool, participants’ response, and effects of the community engagement approach in the health policies.
Appreciative Inquiry Interview
An appreciative inquiry interview is a systematic approach for organizational and social engagement. It comprises questions and dialogue systems that enable participants to recognize their strengths, advantages, and opportunities within their communities. It is an asset or strength-based technique that focuses on positive idea generation over negative problem identification. Hence, helping communities based in public health activities to create social change by recognizing their existing strengths and opportunities and working towards improvement. The questions and dialogue application in this tool enables individuals to collectively work towards bettering their lives with the available resources in their communities.
I decided to select this tool because it focuses on creating positive social change over the problem-identification approach. As a public health nurse, this tool is essential in my career to enhance quality health outcomes among the participants that I work with because, through the tool, they can narrate specific challenges that arise from the health issues affecting them. The tool identifies a collective goal among the participants through four stages to enhance the positive change. It uses four core cycle stages to improve its effectiveness in creating positive change among participants. The stages are as follows, discovery, which involves crafting questions, conducting concrete interviews focusing on the goal of the topic, sharing best practices during the interview to insight participants’ engagement and responding effectively.
The dream stage allows the participants to reflect on their visions their experiences, think of ways to put the dreams into reality and improve themselves (Sandars & Murdoch-Eaton, 2017). The design stage enables selecting appropriate and relevant design elements to help create positive change and realize the available opportunities and strengths within the community settings. The destiny stage enables individuals to review their accomplishments and uphold their achievements (Sandars & Murdoch-Eaton, 2017). This also allows them to work collectively to improve those weak barriers that could still impact the sustainability of the positive change.
Participants
This study focuses on developing a weight program for obese adolescents. Obesity remains a major health issue among the young and adults, with young people suffering from severe health complications, especially in low-income countries. Obese is more prevalent among young people, especially children, because it begins from childhood. In countries like New Zealand, adolescents are the most affected group in obesity (Teevale & Kaholokula, 2018). The application of the appreciative inquiry interview tool is essential in the successful implementation of public health strategies that can help manage the issue of obesity, especially among young people. I learnt that most young people suffering from obesity are influenced by eating behaviors and physical activities. Most of these young people coming from poor households cannot access the health services needed for their condition hence increasing the obesity rates and other health complications such as heart attack and stroke among them.
Challenges in Facilitating the Tool
The appreciative inquiry tool can be tiring for the participants due to its wide range of information. Therefore, some participants can easily ignore the critical information by skipping some processes to get to the final stage of the approach. Therefore, this affects the validity of the tool in conducting the study.
The tool can also make the participants feel like their problems are not being considered. This is because the tool focuses on improving the communities through strengthening them and not necessarily a problem-solving approach. Therefore, it aims at creating positive social change. Due to its systematic structure of alternative approach, it is so hard for participants to realize that the tool touches on the problems through the factors influencing the development of these problems. For instance, in this case, the focus was on finding healthier alternatives to develop weight programs. The validation of the interview questions focused on both the obese and non-obese families, comparing their eating and physical behaviors to find effective strategies that can be implemented to solve this health condition.
Effectiveness of AI Tool on the Participants
The participants gave diverse ideas both from healthy and obese households. Those households with healthy members had strict adherence to nutrition schedules for their families compared to the others. Their ideas were essential in validating effective strategies for implementing nutritional interventions on weight programs to help educate obese young people and change their eating and physical behaviors to improve their health and wellbeing.
The main diversity between the two groups is the socio-economic status. Those families earning low incomes could not afford some nutritious foods thus were forced to live on the available foods they had to sustain for the day. Those households with healthy family members volunteered to create positive change by ensuring all the children’s health and wellbeing were under control. This was going to be possible through volunteering to provide free training for physical exercise and contribute to the provision of healthy meals, constituting fruits and low sugar calories in various schools these children attended.
Health in all Policies
Health in all policies mandates quality care through a critical investigation of social determinants of health such as healthy foods, sustainable environment, effective health costs and services (Walsh et al., 2018). An appreciative inquiry tool can assess the social determinants of health, such as costs in health to manage the mortality rates, especially in chronic illnesses. For instance, different hospitals can be interviewed on their cost-effectiveness and the health services they provide to determine an affordable cost to ensure the community members can access health services on chronic illnesses and mental disorders.
Effectiveness in Reducing Health Disparities
The appreciative inquiry interview tool is essential in managing public health in various ways. The four-cycle stages are the guidelines in facilitating fundamental actions to provide positive change and outcomes. By identifying strengths and bringing community members together, the tool encourages active participation in the long run. The community members can collectively voluntarily bring together the available resources, both human and labor. In responding to the interview questions, they get motivated, especially in identifying their dreams, goals, objectives, and aim to reach the destiny stage and live the life they have all been admiring. The appreciative inquiry process enables people to find alternatives for their problems and work on them. For example, the tool can help the community reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases using the available resources, knowledge and skills. The tool helps change negative perspectives to positive, reflect on past experiences and find alternatives to progress positively, thus an alternative approach (Armstrong et al., 2020).
References
Armstrong, A. J., Holmes, C. M., & Henning, D. (2020). A changing world, again. How Appreciative Inquiry can guide our growth. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 2(1), 100038. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291120300279
de Brún, T., O’Reilly-de Brún, M., Weel-Baumgarten, V., Burns, N., Dowrick, C., Lionis, C., … & MacFarlane, A. (2017). Using Participatory Learning & Action (PLA) research techniques for inter-stakeholder dialogue in primary healthcare: an analysis of stakeholders’ experiences. Research involvement and engagement, 3(1), 1-25. https://researchinvolvement.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40900-017-0077-8
Sandars, J., & Murdoch-Eaton, D. (2017). Appreciative inquiry in medical education. Medical Teacher, 39(2), 123-127. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/109397/3/Appreciative%20Inquiry_ARTICLE_280216%20%281%29.pdf
Teevale, T., & Kaholokula, J. K. (2018). Using appreciative inquiry methodology to develop a weight management program for obese children in New Zealand. Australian and New Zealand Journal of public health, 42(1), 7-11. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6405.12719
Walsh, M., John, D., Peritore, N., Morris, A., Bird, C., Ceraso, M., … & Riportella, R. (2018). Health in all policies: Working across sectors in Cooperative Extension to promote health for all. Journal of Human Sciences and Extension, 6(2). https://www.jhseonline.com/article/view/718