Author: Riley Hagen | Major: Nursing | Semester: Fall 2024

Hi, my name is Riley Hagen and I am a nursing major in COEHP. I am conducting research this Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 under Dr. Marilou Shreve from the nursing department. I graduate this spring and I am hoping to pursue a career as a pediatric hematology/oncology nurse!
My honors thesis is based around research pertaining to the perceptions of health and weight within the Marshallese population. This research may help to identify key perceptions
within this population that contribute to their life-style choices and how they view health and wellness overall. Identification of these perceptions may allow for the creation of interventions that can be implemented early in life in order to prevent diseases that the Marshallese are predisposed to. The overall goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of the perceptions within the Marshallese population in order to see how they could possibly be altered in order to decrease the prevalence of certain diseases within the population including high blood
pressure and type 2 diabetes.
I joined my mentor in this research after hearing her speak about it and the important
implications the findings may have. I took a class that was led by my now current mentor Dr.
Shreve and that is how I was able to hear more about her research and determine the valuable
ways I could contribute to her research. This semester has primarily consisted of condensing and
organizing data from focus groups as well as evaluating previous literature related to this topic.
Through looking at the data we collected, I have been able to gain perspective of the factors that
contribute to perceptions of health and weight and how they can vary greatly from person to
person. The biggest challenge I have come across in this process is the lack of current, relevant
research about the Marshallese population which furthermore has brought to my attention the
importance of conducting research on this topic. I overcame this challenge by broadening the
scope of literature to include perceptions of health and weight amongst various immigrant
populations and Pacific-Islander populations. Another challenge I faced was deciding what
factors I wanted to focus on when looking at the data we had collected from the focus groups. I
decided this by having many discussions with my mentor and gaining her opinion on what might
be the best approach. Overall, my mentor has been essential to helping me understand all the
steps related to the research process when the research contains human subjects. Additionally,
she has guided me in how to make my thesis the most impactful and how to highlight the most
significant parts of the data. The next steps in my research process are to analyze the data that we
have compiled and decide what data I think is the most significant. Once I am able to analyze the
data I will be able to draw conclusions about its significance and begin to discuss the potential
implications for future research on this topic and related topics.