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DOH205/206 Research Skills Guide

Getting started with your assessment

Make sure you clearly understand your task and know what topic you are seeking information for. Check your assessment task details in your Subject Outline

DOH206 Assessment item 1- Oral Health Promotion Project

Oral Health Promotion Project Overview

This assessment requires you to plan and implement a mock oral health promotion (OHP) intervention for a specific community group. You will be allocated a group to develop your OHP intervention with, these groups can be found on Interact under the “OHP Project” tab. Each milestone in the planning to implementation process will present as a separate assessment task.

Task - Part A

1. Needs Assessment

As a group, you will conduct a needs assessment (felt, expressed, comparative and normative needs) for your chosen community to identify the focus of your intervention. As part of your felt needs assessment, your group will be required to make contact with a designated member of the public who represents your chosen community group in some way. More information regarding this interaction will be discussed in class. Based on the needs and potential risk factors identified for your community, your group will be required to devise one aim and two objectives for your OHP intervention. These goals and objectives will be important for your subsequent assessment tasks, and thus need to be created using the “SMART” goal format.

Marking Criteria and Standards

1 - Needs assessment form:

Identifies and analyses oral health needs in the community, with support from relevant literature relating to the issue.

Please note: 

  • This is a condensed version of your assessment topic, please refer to your subject outline for the full details of your assessment, including the marking rubric.
  • The "community group" example used throughout this guide will be aged care residents, please refer to your subject I2 site for detailed case information required for this task.

With an understanding of your task you then need to plan how you will search for information. This starts with identifying and brainstorming keywords.

From your assessment task:

Keywords Synonyms or related terms
community group aged care, nursing home, elderly, senior, old, geriatric
oral health dental care, dental health, dental treatment, oral hygiene, oral care

Does your task place any limits? These might be "in the last X years" or Australian content.

Using synonyms can assist to broaden your search. A dictionary or topic specific encyclopedia may be helpful.

For guidance in topic analysis check out:

DOH206 Assessment 1: Example search strategy

A search strategy using the key concepts identified above, and combined with synonyms and relevant search operators might look like:

("aged care" OR "nursing home*") AND ("oral health" OR dental)

A note on "search operators" used above: quotations marks "" are used to create a phrase search, AND is a Boolean operator, the brackets () are a nesting tool used to create a logical search string & the asterisk * is a truncation symbol used to expand a search, see the Developing your Search Strategy page for more information.

We'll work through how to apply a similar search strategy in Primo Search and journal databases in the next few pages of this guide.

Remember: you will need to try a range of searches. Don't stop after just one!

Charles Sturt University acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands on which its campuses are located, paying respect to Elders, both past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations Peoples.Acknowledgement of Country

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