What To Do

You have just described the health problem and have assessed the importance of the problem to your program. Now, think about specific subgroups within the target population that may be at increased risk. These subgroups should be large enough and different enough from each other and from the general population to justify a separate analysis.

How To Do It

Identify any group of the population who share common characteristics who appear to be at the highest risk for the health problem.

This step uses descriptive epidemiology to describe those who are, or could be, most affected by the problem. You may consider the following indicators to identify differences in subgroups:

• Demographics (for example: age, gender, race, education, income)
  
  
• Geography (for example: residence, place of work, cultural characteristics)
  
  
• Belief systems (for example: attitudes, opinions, intentions, beliefs, values)
  
  
• Time (for example: the season or time of year during which most people experience the problem, temporal)

If resources are limited, you may want to identify the subgroups most ready and willing to change.

In determining these subgroups, you will find these sources of information to be helpful:

• State or local offices of government planning
  
  
• State or local offices of economic development
  
  
• Offices of vital records or vital statistics in state or local health departments
  
  
• Census information from the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov)
  
  
• Consumer psychology and demographics data from Values and Lifestyle (VALS) (http://www.sric-bi.com)

When you have finished this step, you should have determined and described any groups large enough and different enough to be analyzed separately. You are now ready to write a problem statement for each subgroup.