PB2A

For my PB2A, I chose the scholarly academic publication, ‘Adolescents’ perceptions about their weight and practices to lose weight,’ written by Filiz Hisar and Ebru Toruner, which studies the perceptions of adolescents about their body weight and practices to lose weight. This health-related research article from the Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing is easily recognized and categorized as a health research paper, specifically based on its features and conventions. The understanding of these features and conventions of this scholarly academic research paper exemplifies the high-level educational expertise, as well as further comprehends the paper’s operationalized main concepts.

            In most scholarly articles, especially in this health-related paper, presents rhetoric conventions that include a title, authors, key words, abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion, and citations/references. Through the analysis of these conventions we are able to determine the audience, tone, style, purpose, and context of this paper. Written by educated health-science authors in the Department of Nursing, their use of citations of other research articles, various use of study methods, statistics, as well as styling their paper to be structured with headings of the conventions, convey professionalism and expertise that defines this as a scholarly academic paper. By this observation, we are able to determine the targeted audience members of further health-scientist researchers, nurses, doctors, dieticians and health-studying students. We view the context of this paper to the increasing misperceptions from adolescents of their weight, leading to poor health choices. The concerned and informative tone of this paper is set out to aware individuals of the purpose of this paper– the difference between the real weight and self perceived weight of adolescents, and imply methods for school programs to teach body weight and form, and methods of healthy weight loss.

This concept of adolescents’ misperceptions about weight and practices to lose weight were operationalized through data collection. The gathering of results consisted of distributing a fifteen-question form individually out to 703 year 9-12 students in a high school in the Ankara District in Turkey. The posed evaluative questions asked students about their socio-demographic (age, gender, education), their physical and nutritional habits, and their knowledge of health and weight. Key questions asked, “I believe that my weight is…” with optional answers of underweight, healthy, overweight, and obese, and whether they had previously tried to lose weight, and if yes how they tried. Another important question included, “what methods have you used to lose weight?” given the options of physical activity, diet, herbal, throwing up, and medication. These chosen questions were given before the adolescents were anthropometrically measured. The measurements of the students’ body weight (body mass index) were taken and processed by specialized researchers. Formal results consisted of 11% students underweight, 74% healthy weight, 6.4% overweight, and 8.2% obese. However, the perceptions of these students resulted in 13% who considered themselves underweight, 65% healthy, and 20% overweight.  Statistics of this data further warns the readers about the concerns of these misperceptions.

This scholarly academic paper includes rhetoric conventions and features, which shows the proficiency and credibility of the research paper. The operationalized concept of this paper especially highlights the importance of teaching students the right way of understanding body weight and form, as well as the safe and healthy way of losing weight. This paper advises their targeted audience of health professionals, especially nurses, to have important roles to promote health activities, encouraging life behaviours for weight management. With increasing demands of body image through this generation, these researchers want to inform these adolescents and their parents, as well as improve health professionals’ knowledge of the current adolescents’ perceptions of weight, for overall health improvement in the future.