Choosing a Research Topic

I was initially I wanted to do my research on lead poisoning in children and the long term effect it would have on their body. I know that in the United states we have banned lead from being in the majority of our products because we are aware of the dangers that it can cause when consuming it. With this being know I was intrigued because of the Flint, Michigan case where residents of Flint were being poisoned due to the consumption of lead through their water. However after doing some research on the topic I realized that I knew quite a bit about the topic, so that made me want to change my topic. I decided to change my topic to the link between socioeconomic status and health care.
Once I finally decided on a topic I visited the American Journal of Public Health and the Knowledge Center websites where I found many journals, articles, and other sources related to the topic. I came up with the research question: "How do people with low socioeconomic status view health care and its availability?" With this being my research question I plan on examining other parts of the link between low socioeconomic status and healthcare like, are people with low socioeconomic more susceptible to certain chronic diseases than others and how have some experiences made people with low socioeconomic status not want to take advantage of health services? I decided to narrow down my search by looking up key words like: "poverty","community","healthcare","accessibility", and many others.

Sources:
Karen E. Lasser, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler.  Access to Care, Health Status, and Health Disparities in the United States and Canada: Results of a Cross-National Population-Based Survey. American Journal of Public Health: July 2006, Vol. 96, No. 7, pp. 1300-1307.

• This article stood out to me because not only does it discuss health care status and its accessibility in the United States, but in Canada as well. I think that once I get get enough research on health care in the United States and am able to answer my research question, it will be interesting to compare and contrast it to a neighboring country allowing me to take my research paper down multiple path but still focusing on one centralized question.

Socioeconomic status and the occurrence of fatal and nonfatal injury in the United States. American Journal of Public Health: January 2000, Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 70-77.

• This article relates to my research question because one of the things I plan on talking about in my paper are whether or not people with low SES are more susceptible to chronic diseases. However this could relate to that question as well because it provides  evidence on how socioeconomic status can play a role in what type of injury a person is more likely to get.

Research Process: 

I began conducting my research process by looking at the Flint water crisis and developing a deeper understanding of what actually happened, and then I decided to look at the effects of lead on the body more in depth. I found a couple articles that described how the people were effected in Flint and will continue to be effected, and also how there have been laws banning of certain products containing lead because it is already known what lead poisoning can do. By looking at the topic more in depth I began to realize that I already knew a lot about the topic and was not truly interested, by switching my research question and topic to "How do people with low socioeconomic status view health care and its availability?" I found a lot more recent data, and I am actually interested in the topic. When searching on this topic I looked for key words "poverty", "community","health care","accessibility"  to find articles and journals based around my research. I think that this topic is a good one because it could be debatable because people have different opinions.

I plan on looking into the case more and possibly the statistics, while looking at other examples of  personal experiences to show how people with low SES view healthcare.