Disciplinary Research Reflection

For this project we had come up with a broad topic of interest related to our discipline, which we then narrowed down to a more specific and complex question to research. We had to find 10 sources of varying mediums, such as scholarly articles and YouTube videos, to find an answer to our question. I had a hard time finding a topic that I wanted to thoroughly explore and research. For my broad topic, I wanted to discuss socioeconomic education in nursing school and its effect in patient care. Eventually, I stumbled upon the idea of obesity and socioeconomic background. This immediately interested me because I grew up in a small city where I was able to observe the stark contrast between richer neighborhood grocery stores and poorer neighborhoods’ stores. I also observed the appearance of health in these neighborhoods' residents. As I dived deeper into this topic, I wanted to focus more on childhood obesity and why socioeconomic background affects it. As I compiled my ten sources of varying degrees, I noticed that multiple sources connected and pointed to these three main ideas: a parent’s background, access to healthy food, and access to recreational opportunities all influence a child’s probability of being obese. I then used these findings as main sections of my digital report. I chose to present the information in the form of a website page instead of just a paper, because I thought that it might appeal to more people, and I could highlight the videos and visual components of my project. I used different bright colored shapes to break up different paragraphs and sections of texts so that the information would flow better and not be so condensed. This project taught me how to narrow a topic, and analyze and connect various sources of information to support one common idea, which I feel will be valuable skills to have going forward in my academic career.