You will be expected to read about gun violence and develop a hypothesis, identify the data source that can be used to address your hypothesis, and operationalize your plan with population description, sampling features, an intervention, outcomes you will measure, ethical issues you must address, and the benefits potentially gained by your intervention including both population outcomes and economic benefits.
Here is a link to reviews that will point you to the many areas of gun violence from practitioner perception to domestic violence. These reviews should give you enough information to find a area of interest. Your hypothesis can then be developed from the focus of your interest and you must develop an intervention to study. https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/38/1/1/2754874
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040617-014600
A challenge you may face is that much of the gun violence work is older due to blocks on government collection of data. When you design your intervention, remember that you must adhere to current guidelines forbidding data that supports a position to limit firearms. So, the focus of your hypothesis may be based on limiting firearms availability but you can not test that approach and must show how other approaches can reduce the undesirable outcomes of firearm exposure.
For example, suicide by firearms would be reduced if all persons with mental health diagnosis were forbidden from firearm possession but you may not offer a ban on possession. Instead, you must offer other approaches that might reduce suicide by firearm. And no, banning bullets is the same thing.
For your project, please include these related areas together in your analysis.
Part 1: Your background data is drawn from national and local collections of information. As we have spoken in class, data sources must be reviewed for their positive and negative attributes to provide an accurate picture of the population you're interested in.
For your chosen topic, please provide 3 positive and 3 negative attributes of the data sources used. Please provide at least 2 refereed articles describing their positive and negative attributes such that I may understand how you came to choose the attributes you did.
Include this sentence in your part 1 "The data sources used for the assessment of my chosen subject were…" and sentences like "Among the 3 positive attributes I see for this data source are…" and "Among the 3 negative attributes I see for this data source are". These will help focus your opinions and likely should be in separate paragraphs.
Part 2: For your chosen topic, generate a hypothesis that explains how gun violence occurs and how your intervention could affect the negative outcomes from firearms and be careful to choose explanations that you can test. (Hint, it should be something that you can think of ways to measure.) You can read about whatever part of gun violence you like and when you say to yourself "Well, that is wrong" you have found your focus.
Hypotheses can come from anywhere so do not assume you might not have a great idea for a solution. I am reminded of the story of a health club whose shampoo budget was out of control. Members kept taking the shampoo bottles. The board thought about searching members bags, not offering shampoo, and many others till the janitor sitting in the back starts chucking. The chair asks if he has a thought anad his reply is "Take the caps." Simple answers can come from anywhere so yes, you can find a good hypothesis worthy of testing.
Use a sentence like "The hypothesis is gun suicides depend on having guns that look like guns and guns that are shaped like flowers would reduce gun suicides."
Part 3: Design the study to answer your proposed hypothesis reducing negative firearm outcomes.
You may find at this point that you may want to choose a new hypothesis or stat it in a different way because it is too difficult to test. Welcome to science. You may have been considering a project that is too big; you may consider if known factors such as A, B, or C, which are known to be associated with outcome Y, may be easier to measure A, B, and C rather than the long-term outcome Y.
For example, if you know that cigarette smoking is associated with lung cancer or premature death, instead of measuring the effect of your intervention or idea that reduces cancer or death, you might choose to measure how often someone stops smoking after you have exposed some of them to your intervention.
Please indicate the nature of your study. You'll need to suggest how likely your intervention will be to produce change and that magnitude of change will determine how many exposed individuals to your intervention and how many nonexposed individuals to your intervention will need to be monitored. The study duration and specific outcome measurements and how you plan to apply statistical measures to these outcomes must be clearly defined.
You will be spared the need to draft a institutional review board (IRB) application and the need for an informed consent but you should list the potential ethical concerns of patients who are exposed to or not exposed to your proposed intervention. Flower-shaped guns could trigger a psychological crisis if someone had been assaulted by a bouquet, so while a goofy example, a plan for dealing with the issue would be an ethical responsibility.
Part 4: You'll be asked to state if the results of your study are successful at improving your hypothesis what can we expect as a potential benefit for adopting your intervention. If your study is meaningful and addresses a concern of significant size or cost, what will be the change in mortality, illnesses, employability, and potential cost savings. You were not being asked to produce economic forcasts but to list these potential benefits in a qualitative form.
For example, if I am able to reduce the number of individuals smoking cigarettes by 50% in the one year duration of my study, I would expect that lung cancer is less frequent and life expectancy will be longer, I would expect fewer patients to require medical attention for lung disease and cancer, I would expect more individuals to work to the full length of their life, and costs would be saved by less treatment of lung disease and cancer and the requirement for less disability from medical diseases of the lung.
Needless to say, anyone using the example of flower shaped guns, will receive a 0.
Good luck and I expect these reports to be no more than 3 pages but can include tables and charts as not counted addendums.
