PUBH 6036 Week 1 Question Workshop Example

From a Worry About Night Bites to a Question One School Year Can Answer: A FINER Question Workshop on Bed Bug Infestation and Missed School Days Among Children in a Composite Housing Authority

Student Name

Walden University

PUBH 6036: Public Health Research Methods

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From a Worry About Night Bites to a Question One School Year Can Answer: A FINER Question Workshop on Bed Bug Infestation and Missed School Days Among Children in a Composite Housing Authority

The Interest, Stated Loosely

Children in apartment buildings with bed bugs seem to sleep badly and miss school. I work as a resident services coordinator at the Cedar Hollow Housing Authority, a composite agency with nine family buildings, and the sentence above is how the concern first reached me: from caregivers who asked for a letter to the school explaining why a child kept falling asleep in class. The sentence is a worry, not a question. It names no age, no measure of infestation, no outcome that could be counted and no time span. This workshop drafts three questions from it and keeps one.

Candidate 1

"Did the city's bed bug disclosure ordinance reduce infestations in rental housing?"

This draft fails feasibility first. An ordinance applies to a whole city at once, so there is no comparison group inside the city, and infestation counts before the law were never collected in a form I could reach. It also hides a causal claim, "reduced," that only a design with a credible comparison could support. It is interesting and relevant, but a master's student with one year and no citywide data cannot answer it.

Candidate 2

"What share of Cedar Hollow apartments have bed bugs?"

This draft is feasible. Wang et al. (2016) estimated building infestation rates of 3.8% to 29.5% across 43 low-income buildings in New Jersey with a combination of interviews, quick visual checks and interceptor cups set under bed and sofa legs, so a method exists. The problem is drift. The question has lost the children entirely. A prevalence figure would help the maintenance department plan, but it would say nothing about sleep or school, which is why the worry reached me in the first place.

Candidate 3

"Among children aged 6 to 12 living in Cedar Hollow family buildings, is a confirmed bed bug infestation in the home at the start of the school year associated with the number of school days missed during that year?"

This draft names a population, an exposure that can be confirmed rather than only reported, an outcome the school district already records and a time span of one school year. It survives.

Table 1

FINER Verdicts for the Three Candidates

Note. Criteria follow Hulley et al. (2013).

Why Two Letters Decided the Verdicts

Hulley et al. (2013) list five tests for a research question, but they did not weigh equally here. Nearly any question about children and housing can claim to be interesting and relevant, so those two rows separated nothing. Feasibility removed the first candidate and ethics shaped the third, because asking families about bed bugs inside a housing authority touches their lease. Novelty needs an honest line. Adults with infestations report more sleep disturbance and anxiety than unexposed tenants (Susser et al., 2012), so the link between infestation and poor sleep is not new. What appears untested is whether it reaches children's school attendance, and that is the only novelty this question claims.

The Survivor, Broken Into Parts

The population is children aged 6 to 12 in the nine family buildings, identified through household rosters. The exposure is an infestation confirmed by a trained inspector or by interceptor cups at a fall baseline visit, not a caregiver's impression alone, since nearly half of the infestations found by one building-wide protocol were in homes whose residents did not know about them (Wang et al., 2016). The outcome is days absent, taken from district attendance files with written caregiver permission. The time span is one school year, September to June.

What the Survivor Leaves Out

Adults' sleep and mental health, which the first studies examined, are outside the question. So are children under 6, children in senior or mixed buildings, sleep measured directly and the cost of treatment to families. School grades are left out as well, because they depend on too many other things to be read from one year of data. Naming these losses keeps the final question from being mistaken for the whole worry, and each could become a later study.

References

Hulley, S. B., Cummings, S. R., Browner, W. S., Grady, D. G., & Newman, T. B. (2013). Designing clinical research (4th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Susser, S. R., Perron, S., Fournier, M., Jacques, L., Denis, G., Tessier, F., & Roberge, P. (2012). Mental health effects from urban bed bug infestation (Cimex lectularius L.): A cross-sectional study. BMJ Open, 2(5), Article e000838. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000838

Wang, C., Singh, N., Zha, C., & Cooper, R. (2016). Bed bugs: Prevalence in low-income communities, resident's reactions, and implementation of a low-cost inspection protocol. Journal of Medical Entomology, 53(3), 639-646. https://doi.org/10.1093/jme/tjw018