One mechanism of beginning to gain familiarity with determinants of health within a community is to perform a windshield survey. This can be accomplished by either driving or walking through your community of interest (anywhere in Suffolk County, New York), spending some time in public spaces for observation, and assessing services related to the health, economy, and social structure of the environment.
Stanley and Niemi (2026) provide guidelines for a Community Familiarization (Windshield) Survey (Box 15-3 in Chapter 15, p. 377 for hard copy texts) that should be used as the outline for your assessment. Please become acquainted with the survey categories before conducting the assessment. You will notice that the guidelines also ask at several points for information that you may need to research outside of your observation (e.g., rates of unemployment).
Directions:
Compose a scholarly paper to summarize your windshield survey. Write the paper in APA style, using the windshield survey guidelines on p 433 of our textbook and the following guidelines for the structure of the paper. Please note that there are specific points to address in the analysis/conclusion. Include a properly formatted title page and reference page, in addition to 4-6 pages of content. Support your content with at least 6 scholarly references. Primary sources of community data ( e.g., the US Census) will be considered as scholarly references for this assignment.
Components of the Paper:
- Title Page - create a page header with the page number in the upper right corner; omit the running head
- Body of the paper
- Use the Title of the Paper as a level 1 heading for your introductory paragraph. This heading is centered, in title case, with a bold font.
- Physical Environment (Level 1 heading)
- Economic Considerations (Level 1 heading)
- Services (Level 1 heading)
- Social Structure (Level 1 heading)
- Analysis and Conclusion (Level 1 heading)
- From your observations: what community-level determinants stand out to you as potential contributors to population health, community, and/or public health? How so? (please choose 3) Do these determinants have the potential to affect health equity? How so? Do these determinants have the ability to affect preparation or impact for disaster or public health emergency*? How so?