What To Do

Think of your health problem as the gap between what should occur in your community and what is occurring. It’s the gap between an acceptable or desirable health status and the current status.

Use existing information to answer “who,” “what,” “when” and “where” questions about the gap. This is called descriptive epidemiology.

Examine data on your problem by:

• age
• gender
• race/ethnicity
• socioeconomic status
• geographic distribution

Spell out the impact of the problem on key population segments.

How To Do It

To write your problem statement, briefly answer these questions:

• What should be occurring?
• What is occurring?
• Who is affected and to what degree?
• What could happen if the problem isn’t addressed?

Use health status indicators to answer the first 3 questions. Health status indicators are data on outcomes such as:

• Flu vaccine coverage levels
• Teen pregnancy rates
• Heart disease rates

…or their causes (e.g., smoking rates). Often, these data are already broken down by age, gender, race and geographic area.

Dig deeper into health status indicators.

Lots of health status indicator data is posted on the Web by governmental and nonprofit organizations. For information about these sources and websites, click on Resources. (See Coalitions/partnerships: Specific partners in the Categorized Index)

You can explain what should be occurring by showing discrepancies between:

• local health status indicators and a national level indicator
• local subgroup indicators
• goals at the national (see CDC Health Protection Goal http://www.cdc.gov/about/goals/ and Healthy People 2010 Goals http://www.healthypeople.gov/state/toolkit/partners.htm), state or local levels and health status indicators from your area

Example: In the Chitterling Preparation case, local data were used to show that African American infants in Atlanta were developing a sometimes fatal illness that did not strike white infants. This disparity in local health indicators prompted the allocation of campaign resources entirely to the African American community. To see problem statements from several campaigns, click on the Examples button at the right.

Knowledge Check

Test Your Knowledge

Use My Plan

To record your problem statement, click on the button to the right labeled My Plan and follow the directions. You will see a form with a blank for each step in the Social Marketing planning process and related worksheets. Record your problem statement under Phase 1, Step 1 and then save your My Plan file so that you can add to it later.

You may not be able to answer all the descriptive epidemiology questions at this point. Make note of any critical missing information; it will be reframed as a set of market research questions in the next phase.