Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes in Adolescent Navajo Indians - Essay Example

"Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes in Adolescent Navajo Indians" is a great example of a paper on diabetes mellitus. My desire to be part of the community-based health initiative did not come about as a result of persuasion but as part of personal convection to play my role in an organized society. The community around me indeed needs a kind of health support, which I have solutions to as a professional nurse. As a nursing practitioner, even though I may be professionally employed and earn income based on the work I do, I also see myself as obliged to pay my dues to the community in the form of such supportive community initiatives that are aimed at minimizing the plight of people. In this case, the target group is the young adolescent Navajo Indians who are one of the most vulnerable groups when it comes to issues of type 2 diabetes (Buerhaus & Needleman, 2000).

Data were presented from a number of sources as part of the original database to be used in the proposed community health project but these data were not sufficient. For a people-centered health promotion program of this nature, it is always important to depend on a wide range of data that come from different reliable sources (Fabre, 2005). This was particularly important as the approach to the community health initiative was action-driven and centered on finding an urgent preventive solution to an immediate problem. For this reason, it was necessary to beef up the existing data with more data from both secondary and primary sources. Subsequently, the research was opened up to a mixed method of data collection. Once this happened, I was in my capacity as a key stakeholder in a position to benefit from the merits and advantages of both the secondary method of data collection and the primary method of data collection.

The strengths of the proposal are seen in two major criteria. In the first place, the data collection method, which was a mixed-method, was a major strength in ensuring that the reliability and validity of the research were guaranteed. For example, it is common knowledge that the use of secondary data collection alone is associated with the weakness of having to deal with data which sources may not be substantiated. While this could compromise the success of the entire data collection process for the proposal, this was overtaken by the presence of the primary data collection process. A weakness of the primary data collection process, which includes the limitations placed on the researcher with regard to the scope of data collection (Bray, 2008), was also overcome by means of the free-range data collection nature of secondary data collection for the proposal. In the second vein, the research design instituted for the proposal was a major strength of the proposal in meeting the aims and objectives spelled out for the community health initiative. This is because the action research method, which always identifies a particular problem within a locality and solves the problem with the presence of the people who are directly affected by it, was used (“Community health profiles,” 2006).

The major strengths of the proposal discussed above notwithstanding, there were a number of weaknesses recorded. One of these weaknesses had to do with the sampling procedure that was used. Indeed, even though it may be true to argue that if type 2 diabetes is detected among young adolescents, it may easily be controlled and possibly prevented (Kodua, 2001), the adult population also has very high rates of type 2 diabetes infections and so should have been included in the sample to achieve a holistic community-based health control proposal (Clark, 2005).

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