Adolescent’s mental health through the pandemic, how to spot it and help families treat it.
Purpose: Identifying a suitable topic for your proposal. This assignment will prepare you for the Final Grant
Proposal assignment. If you do a good job with the Topic assignment, you will be able to incorporate a lot of the
work you did for the Topic assignment into your Grant Proposal.
1) Title of your topic?
“2020, the new norm and its effects on my mental health.” (feel free to modify it if you think of a more creative
title?)
2) What specifically are you looking to find out?
Briefly, what do you intend to find out?
What is your hypothesis?
What are your independent and dependent variables? Make sure your IVs and DVs are concrete and
measurable.
3) Why are you interested in this particular topic?
NOTE: I am a Health Educator, and I am pursuing a master’s degree in health education. I am a Latino man
living in New York. I am concerned about the mental health of adolescents in underserved communities of New
York City, much like the south Bronx throughout the COVID Pandemic who have little to no resources to
combat the environmental, psychological, financial burdens brought by the global pandemic.
Describe your reasons for choosing this topic:
– Think about a health problem that really interests you.
– What do you hope to get out of studying this health problem?
– Would it benefit you, your family, or your community in some way? Would it help you at the place where you
work? Could you implement this study at your workplace? Or could this study help further your career goals?
4) Will you have the resources to conduct this study if you choose to do this study next semester?
Your choice of topic is going to be guided by how much time and money you have at your disposal as well as
whether you have access to a specific sample. Treat this assignment as if you intend to do the study next
semester. Utopianly, you have only one year to do the study (including data analysis and writing up the results)
and a maximum of $5,000 at your disposal. Think about how many people will need to be involved in this study.
Who is going to help you, if any? What kinds of things are you going to need to do your study (money, office
supplies, testing instruments, consent from a school, etc.)? All these factors are crucial when deciding who and
what to study. Explain how you think your study will be doable.
5) Is your topic relevant to health educators professionals?
Explain how so. Try to identify something specific about a health problem – see what is not well known about it
– so that your intended study will make a dent in current knowledge or practice, even if it is in a very small way.
In other words, how will your study be different from other studies in this area and how will it help health
educators and allied health professionals?
6) Is it original or does it have an angle?
Explain how your topic is original or has an interesting angle. Make sure you provide evidence from the
professional literature that your topic will be filling a gap in our knowledge. I am looking for is for you to identify
an angle or hole in current knowledge about a health problem.
7) Does your topic focus on knowledge, attitudes, or behavior (KAB)?
Explain how so. Make sure your topic focuses on surveying knowledge, attitudes and/or behavior as opposed
to things that would require blood analysis or anything medical. If you are not a physician or physiologist, stick
with measuring KAB. No epidemiological studies either, since you are not training to become an epidemiologist
and that requires another skill set.
8) Is your topic too broad?
This is the number one weakness of many proposals. The only solution to this is to read current research
studies about the health problem that interests you. The only way that you are going to be able to come up with
something appropriate is if you have a decent grasp of the literature about this health problem. Explain how
your topic is not too broad.
9) Is there too much or too little literature already on this topic?
The only way you are going to know that is by reading as much as you can about the topic. Start looking for
ways to narrow it and then search the literature again using this narrower focus. Provide an informed
assessment of how much or how little is known about your topic.
10) What have been the major trends in the literature about your topic in terms of what further research needs
to be done?
Most articles will contain statements about what weaknesses were in their study and they recommend what
future research should do. You can get great tips and ideas for a topic by reading this section of articles. The
authors are telling you what to focus on!!! Provide a list of trends from the professional literature and make sure
you cite all your sources (using APA style).