Organizing Pediatric Research Data with Dr. Shreve
Author: Sandra Piel | Major: Nursing | Semester: Fall 2024
Hello, my name is Sandra Piel and I am an honors student at the University of Arkansas. I am in the College of Education and Health Professions with a major in Nursing. This semester I have been working alongside Dr. Marilou Shreve studying pediatric obesity in the state of Arkansas. This semester, Fall of 2024, is my first semester working on research and I will do two more semesters working with Dr. Shreve until I graduate in December of 2025.
In the United States pediatric obesity rates are at an all-time high. The goal of our research project is to evaluate the rates of obesity in children who seek care from one of the largest Federally Qualified Health Centers in the state of Arkansas, ARcare, and evaluate how these children differ from children in Arkansas as a whole. Federally Qualified Health Centers are clinics that offer many different health services to patients regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay (“What Is an FQHC”, n.d.). Studying the obesity rates in these centers and comparing them to Arkansas children as a whole could help determine some of the causes of obesity and if factors like socio economic class affect the likelihood or probability of a child becoming obese.
When looking for a mentor and research topic I wanted to focus on something I am really passionate about. I have always been passionate about kids and always known that I wanted to be a pediatric nurse when I graduate. As a future nurse I know I want to be able to educate and care for my patients in the best way possible. With current obesity rates being so high, as a nurse I expect to see many children and patients that struggle with obesity and I would love to be able to help them and educate them. When I looked at the Faculty Mentor Dashboard on the College of Education and Health Professions Honors Program website and saw that Dr. Shreve had research projects studying the state of pediatric obesity in Arkansas, I knew I would love to join. I reached out and that is how I found my topic and mentor.
I have learned a lot through this semester of research. This fall’s focus was organizing our data so we can later analyze it and draw conclusions and patterns in our next step. Our two project data sets are ARcare data and the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) data. For the ARcare data, we had over 37,000 cells of patient data taken from different ARcare clinic locations located all around Arkansas. The data had the zipcode of the clinic location on it, but not the specific clinic where the patient was treated. The other data set, the ACHI, posts the pediatric obesity rates for all Arkansas students in public schools during each school year as a state, by school strict, and by school. Using both of these data sets and collaborating with Dr. Shreve I had to determine the most beneficial way to sort the data for analyzation. Because we had the zipcodes of the clinic locations in the ARcare data, we determined the best method to analyze the rates of childhood obesity was to compare the obesity rates of children who seek care from Federally Qualified Health Centers in a certain district to the obesity rates of all of the children in that school district, and then to compare that to Arkansas children as a whole. This semester I spent the majority of the time scrutinizing the 37,000+ cells of ARcare data. Since I was organizing the data by school district I had to first identify the school districts we wanted to analyze and the data we thought would give us the most valuable research. I chose eight different school districts from varying parts of Arkansas and varying populations to include additional data points in our analysis. To start I had to research all of the zipcodes that are included in each of the eight school districts, then pull every patient data cell that had one of those zipcodes in it. My biggest challenge was mastering Excel. As a nursing student, my experience with Excel was limited, so the learning curve for me was significant. Dr. Shreve helped every step of the way and we met regularly to evaluate the progress on our research project.
Our next step is to analyze the data that we have organized. The biggest focal point in our research is obesity rates in children who seek care from Federally Qualified Health Centers compared to all children, but our data set will allow us to analyze considerably more than that. We are going to look at how so many different things affect obesity; geographical location, population, urban vs rural, gender, ethnicity/race, provider type, how elementary, middle, and high school children differ from each other, and how the obesity rates change from 2019-2022 from the potential effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
I am so thankful for this Honors College Research Grant because it has allowed me to study and research something that I am really passionate about. I am so excited to continue this project for two more semesters and work alongside Dr. Shreve.
Reference
What Is an FQHC? (n.d.). Primary Health Network. https://www.primary-health.net/fqhc/