This project seeks to address the issue of adolescent obesity by implementing health education on lifestyle changes in obese adolescents to reduce obesity rates. The primary consideration taken during the selection of the articles to conduct the literature review was the emphasis on articles that focused on adolescent obesity. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a literature review to analyze how the existing research supports the PICOT and to determine what is known and unknown in the evidence. The literature review will be based on the PICOT question paper and the literature evaluation table that was developed earlier in this project. In particular, the literature review will involve a comparison of articles in areas such as research questions, sample population, and limitations of the study.
The articles used in the literature evaluation table and the PICOT question paper used different research questions to address the study objectives. The types of the research questions varied and entailed direct research questions, indirect or implied research questions, and hypotheses. The studies that used direct research questions in the current project included Nga et al., (2019), Jacob et al., (2021), and Leis et al., (2019). On the other hand, research questions could only be implied from the text in some articles. Such articles included Salam et al., (2020), Foster et al., (2018), and Martin et al., (2018). Other studies such as Pereira & Oliveira (2021) and Kim & Lim (2019) used hypotheses to help in guiding the thinking of readers about the topic and assist in providing a solution.
All the studies used in the literature evaluation table and the PICOT question paper were conducted in different settings and entailed different sample populations based on the objectives that the researchers planned to achieve. Some studies used an exact sample population while other studies used a general population of the target adolescent population. For instance, Leis et al., (2019) and Martin et al., (2018) used a specific sample population in their studies. In other studies such as Foster et al., (2018), the researchers used a general population of obese adolescents and children without narrowing it to a specific number. The majority of the studies also involved the use of systematic reviews or comprehensive searches of studies from reputable databases. Based on the inclusion criteria, these studies included a specific number of studies as the sample population. The studies included Jacob et al., (2021), Salam et al., (2020), and Pereira & Oliveira (2021). Finally, in other studies such as Nga et al., (2019), only the settings for the research were included without specifying the sample population.
This study sought to implement health education on lifestyle changes among obese adolescents to reduce obesity rates. However, the studies used to inform this project are marred with some limitations. The first limitation of the study involves the discrepancy in supporting the project objective. Virtually, all the articles used in the study focused on the project’s area of focus, which is adolescent obesity. Although all the studies focused on obesity health education, some studies focused specifically on lifestyle modifications to address obesity (Salam et al., 2020), while other studies such as Pereira & Oliveira (2021) and Leis et al., (2019) only considered single as an aspect of dietary interventions in addressing adolescent obesity. Moreover, some studies such as Leis et al., (2019) and Kim & Lim (2019) focused on general childhood obesity, which entails obesity among children and adolescents
The other outstanding limitation of the study centers on the size of the population sample utilized. The size of the population sample used in studies often plays a critical role in the reliability and validity of the study. As such, researchers should always be cautious with population sample size when conducting research. In the project at hand, all the studies deployed different population sample sizes. Some studies such as Leis et al., (2019) used a big sample size consisting of 3915 participants while other studies such as Jacob et al., (2021) used 39 publications in the systematic review. In research, a bigger sample population sample size is crucial in achieving accurate mean values and reducing the error margin. However, a small population sample size can potentially lead to the risk of unreliability as a result of larger variability, which can enhance the possibility of bias, and error ma
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