Case: 

You are developing a health promotion, disease prevention initiative within the CUMC neighborhood.  Your team’s special interest is in diabetes.  You decide to investigate resources available at the Knowledge Center and the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library to help create a program tailored to serve the population within Washington Heights.

Objective:
To optimize work within a community, it is important to learn as much as possible about the population of interest.
  • Learn about the quantitative indicators of your population or the demographics such as age,  education level, income, household characteristics, etc.
  • Learn about the qualitative indicators of your population such as religious beliefs, parenting, eating habits, culture, environment etc.
  • Investigate the medical and clinical issues within your population by researching topics such as chronic disease, mental health, nutrition, child development, aging etc.
Method: 
Some statistical resources would be useful to gather ‘quantitative’ indicators of the population of interest, for example:

 

For Example: Identify some demographics about the population living within the CUMC neighborhood. Here, InfoShare will be a useful resource as it provides data from the 2010 census.  Searches can be filtered or limited to the zip code 10032.  Within this zip code, we find the following population characteristics:

Hispanic/Latino population is 69%

Non-Hispanic population is 31%

Within the Hispanic population, 41.9% are Dominicans

(based on the 2010 census)

Note: InfoShare can also be used to search for other data such as household characteristics, income, race, age groups, etc.

 

 

Investigate the qualitative characteristics of a population (such as religious beliefs, parenting, eating habits, culture, etc.) by searching databases such as:

 

For Example: Learn about the population of interest by searching for topics in the social sciences; below is a citation from the database Social Sciences Full text.

Influences on Food Away from Home, Feeding Practices Among English and Spanish Speaking Parent-Child Dyads.

Pinard C, Byker C, Harden SM et al

Journal of Child & Family Studies; Jul 2015, Vol. 24 issue 7, p:2099-2106

Search strategy: (Hispanic Americans OR Dominicans OR Latin Americans) AND (Food OR Nutrition) AND Acculturation

 

Investigate the medical and clinical issues within the population of interest by searching the health sciences databases.  Select the following databases to research topics such as mental health, clinical medicine, delivery of healthcare, emergency medical services, etc.  (Please note, there is considerable interdisciplinary overlap between the social sciences and the clinical and medical literature).

 

For Example: Below is a citation from a PubMed search on a medical topic regarding diabetes and healthcare delivery among the population of interest.

A regional health collaborative formed by New York-Presbyterian aims to improve the health of a largely Hispanic community.

Carrillo JE, Shekhani NS, Deland EL et al.

Health Affairs (Millwood). Oct 2011; Vol. 30 issue 10, p:1955-64.

Search strategy: Hispanic Americans AND New York City AND (healthcare disparities OR disease management)

 

Study Designs

Depending upon the focus of the research or the type of question being asked, study designs can be an important component of the research methodology.  Study design terms may also be incorporated into a search strategy. Use the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term ‘Epidemiologic Studies’ to search for a study design of interest. The MeSH database can be searched at this link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh

Below is a display of some terms that map to the concept of Epidemiologic Studies.  Subject terms from this list may be incorporated into the search strategy.

Epidemiologic Studies

Case-Control Studies

Retrospective Studies

Cohort Studies

Follow-Up Studies

Longitudinal Studies +

Prospective Studies

Retrospective Studies

Controlled Before-After Studies

Cross-Sectional Studies

Historically Controlled Study

Interrupted Time Series Analysis

Seroepidemiologic Studies

HIV Seroprevalence

Learn more about study design from the Center for Evidence Based Medicine at the link: http://www.cebm.net/index.aspx?o=1039

 

Conclusion:

By searching the databases and using relevant tools available to us, we can build on our knowledge about the Hispanic population and diabetes.  This will help us to create informed, research based healthcare programs for this community.

Additional Information:

Learn how to obtain materials, including full text of documents

 Locate additional research assistance from the HSL homepage