Solution
Participatory Learning and Action Tool
PLA is an action approach used in research to draw essential ideas and perspectives of stakeholders’ involvement. The action tool encourages stakeholders’ engagement towards achieving the stipulated objectives. Therefore, it is a practical research technique with different stakeholders having world view perspectives and may involve the existence of power and require balancing (de Brún et al., 2017). Its main principle validates the reversal of the stakeholders’ involvement to research as beneficiaries to direct collaborators and partners. This study reviews the Appreciative Inquiry Interview PLA tool, participants involved, cultural insights learnt from the chosen participants, challenges encountered in facilitating the tool, participants’ response, and effects of the community engagement approach in the health policies.
Appreciative Inquiry Interview
An appreciative inquiry interview is a systematic approach for organizational and social engagement. It comprises questions and dialogue systems that enable participants to recognize their strengths, advantages, and opportunities within their communities. It is an asset or strength-based technique that focuses on positive idea generation over negative problem identification. Hence, helping communities based in public health activities to create social change by recognizing their existing strengths and opportunities and working towards improvement. The questions and dialogue application in this tool enables individuals to collectively work towards bettering their lives with the available resources in their communities.
I decided to select this tool because it focuses on creating positive social change over the problem-identification approach. As a public health nurse, this tool is essential in my career to enhance quality health outcomes among the participants that I work with because, through the tool, they can narrate specific challenges that arise from the health issues affecting them. The tool identifies a collective goal among the participants through four stages to enhance the positive change. It uses four core cycle stages to improve its effectiveness in creating positive change among participants. The stages are as follows, discovery, which involves crafting questions, conducting concrete interviews focusing on the goal of the topic, sharing best practices during the interview to insight participants’ engagement and responding effectively.
The dream stage allows the participants to reflect on their visions their experiences, think of ways to put the dreams into reality and improve themselves (Sandars & Murdoch-Eaton, 2017). The design stage enables selecting appropriate and relevant design elements to help create positive change and realize the available opportunities and strengths within the community settings. The destiny stage enables individuals to review their accomplishments and uphold their achievements (Sandars & Murdoch-Eaton, 2017). This also allows them to work collectively to improve those weak barriers that could still impact the sustainability of the positive change.
Participants
This study focuses on developing a weight program for obese adolescents. Obesity remains a major health issue among the young and adults, with young people suffering from severe health complications, especially in low-income countries. Obese is more prevalent among young people, especially children, because it begins from childhood. In countries like New Zealand, adolescents are the most affected group in obesity (Teevale & Kaholokula, 2018). The application of the appreciative inquiry interview tool is essential in the successful implementation of public health strategies that can help manage the issue of obesity, especially among young people. I learnt that most young people suffering from obesity are influenced by eating behaviors and physical activities. Most of these young people coming from poor households cannot access the health services needed for their condition hence increasing the obesity rates and other health complications such as heart attack and stroke among them.
Challenges in Facilitating the Tool
The appreciative inquiry tool can be tiring for the participants due to its wide range of information. Therefore, some participants can easily ignore the critical information by skipping some processes to get to the final stage of the approach. Therefore, this affects the validity of the tool in conducting the study.
The tool can also make the participants feel like their problems are not being considered. This is because the tool focuses on improving the communities through strengthening them and not necessarily a problem-solving approach. Therefore, it aims at c
Quality Work
Unlimited Revisions
Affordable Pricing
24/7 Support
Fast Delivery