Sample Answer
A Review of the Effectiveness of a Health Promotion Intervention
Introduction
This essay sets out a detailed proposal for a double dissertation project that will review the effectiveness of a specific health promotion intervention. The aim is to explore how carefully designed strategies can support healthier behaviours within populations and reduce the burden of preventable disease. The chosen public health focus is smoking cessation among young adults. Smoking remains a leading cause of premature death globally, yet many young people continue to smoke despite widespread awareness campaigns and restrictive policies. This age group represents a critical window of opportunity, as habits formed during young adulthood often persist throughout life.
The essay is organised into six chapters. The first chapter outlines the background and rationale for selecting smoking cessation as the central theme. The second chapter explains the research methodology, focusing on the search strategy, use of databases, and inclusion and exclusion criteria. The third chapter summarises five selected research articles, while the fourth describes the critical appraisal methods that will be applied. Chapter five highlights the key themes that emerge across the studies, and the final chapter offers conclusions and recommendations for further work. This structure provides a clear and systematic approach to addressing the research question.
Chapter 1: Background and Rationale
Smoking continues to pose a major challenge in public health. According to the World Health Organization, more than eight million people die each year as a result of tobacco use, with many more living with chronic illness linked to smoking. In the United Kingdom, Public Health England has repeatedly reported that smoking is the single largest cause of preventable illness and death, with the highest rates found among people living in disadvantaged communities. Young adults represent an important target group, since many smokers begin during adolescence or early adulthood and may struggle to stop once dependence develops.
The proposed project focuses on interventions designed to support smoking cessation among young adults aged between eighteen and thirty years. This group is at a pivotal stage of life when long-term behaviours are shaped, and effective interventions can therefore have a significant impact on health outcomes over time. Initial reading in this area suggests that a wide range of interventions have been trialled, including digital health tools such as mobile phone applications, face-to-face counselling, group therapy, and pharmacological aids such as nicotine replacement therapy. Evidence indicates that while some interventions are effective in the short term, maintaining long-term cessation remains a considerable challenge.
The research will be guided by the PICO framework. The population will be defined as young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty who smoke. The intervention will be any health promotion strategy designed to support smoking cessation, such as counselling or mobile applications. The comparator will be standard care or the absence of a structured intervention. The outcome will be measured in terms of successful quit attempts, reduced prevalence of smoking, or sustained abstinence over time. The proposed research question is therefore: How effective are health promotion interventions in supporting smoking cessation among young adults?
Chapter 2: Methodology
The methodology will focus on identifying and reviewing relevant research studies through a systematic database search. PubMed has been selected as the primary database because it contains a wide range of peer-reviewed health and medical journals. A structured search strategy will be developed using appropriate keywords and search operators. For example, terms such as “smoking cessation”, “young adults”, “tobacco control”, “health promotion”, and “intervention” will be used, combined with Boolean operators such as AND and OR to refine the results. Truncation will also be applied to capture different word endings, for example “interven*” to include both “intervention” and “interventions”.
The search will be restricted to articles published in English between 2015 and 2024 to ensure that the evidence is recent and relevant to current practice. From the initial search, it is expected that several hundred articles will be identified. These will be narrowed down by reviewing abstracts to ensure that the studies focus specifically on smoking cessation in young adults. The final selection will consist of five articles, which will form the core evidence base for this review.
Clear inclusion and exclusion criteria will be applied. Studies will be included if they involve an intervention designed to promote smoking cessation in young adults, are published in peer-reviewed journals, and report on effectiveness in terms of measurable outcomes. Studies will be excluded if they focus on populations outside the chosen age range, if they do not evaluate an intervention, or if they are not available in English. Ethical considerations will also be taken into account, ensuring that the selected studies were approved by relevant review boards and that participants’ confidentiality and informed consent were maintained.
