Human physiology

Overview
Let’s say that it has come to our attention that students at OSU who have infants and toddlers find it very difficult to locate quality child care. To address this problem, we decide to write a grant to fund a quality childcare center on campus. What would be our first step?

The answer is that we would start by gathering factual information about the problem.

How many students have children under the age of four?
How many students are not able to find good child care?
What child care is currently available?
How many more child care slots are needed?

Together, this information considers the prevalence of the problem. In other words, we are asking, how big of a problem do we have?

Our second step would be to document the consequences of the problem. To continue with the above example, we would document the consequences OSU students experience because of a lack of quality childcare available to them. We might find, for example, that this issue results in high levels of stress that affect students’ school performance. Perhaps the problem causes financial stress that leads students to drop out of school. Maybe it leads to strain in romantic partnerships or negatively affects students’ ability to parent well.

Information about both the prevalence and the consequences of the problem persuades the reader that this is a widespread problem that has serious consequences.

The third step is to document some of the causes of the problem. Again, following the above example, we could document reasons for the high cost of childcare, reasons for the lack of availability for students, etc.

INSTRUCTIONS

To write the problem statement, you will gather information about (a) the prevalence, (b) the consequences, and (c) the causes of the problem you chose.

FORMAT

then, you will organize the information in the following format:

1. Each of the three sections should be one to three paragraphs long and written in the order indicated above (prevalence, consequences, & causes)

2. You can arrange your prevalence section from national to state, and local prevalence data

3. The consequences information could be organized, depending on your information, with a focus on developmental domains (physical, cognitive, social-emotional) or on relationships (parent-child, neighborhood, family-school), or some other way

4. You can think of causes as risk factors, particularly because in the social sciences we do not know exactly what causes a problem but we know what factors are associated with the problem (risk factors)

MY TOPIC IS CHILD ABUSE