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Journal Article 1: Beran, D. (2015). Needs and needs assessments: A gap in the literature for chronic diseases. SAGE Open, 1–10.

This article contains a literature review of studies focused on identifying the needs of people with chronic diseases. The author identified the following categories in the reviewed articles: standardized tools, comparison of needs between individuals and health professionals, tools for evaluation, and description of needs. The review highlights the gap between tools used to assess health care needs versus actual health needs.

Journal Article 2: Cain, C. L., Orionzi, D., O’Brien, M., & Trahan, L. (2016). The power of community voices for enhancing community health needs assessments. Health Promotion Practice, 18, 437–443.

This article provides an example of a mandated needs assessment, a growing trend in the current political climate. Under the Affordable Care Act, nonprofit hospitals were required to conduct community health needs assessments every three years. This article discusses a study in which qualitative methods (i.e., videotaped and coded interviews with community members) were used to assess the health needs in a community. Thus, this article incorporates content from Ch. 5 and 6 of the textbook.

Journal Article 3: Calsyn, R. J., Kelemen, W. L., Jones, E. T., & Winter, J. P. (2001). Reducing overclaiming in needs assessment studies: An experimental comparison. Evaluation Review, 25, 583–604.

This article contains a seminal study referenced in Ch. 6 examining participants’ propensity to overestimate their awareness of organizations. The researchers conducted a randomized experiment comparing participants who were given a warming that some agencies included on their list were fictitious with participants who were not given such a warning. As predicted, respondents who were warned that the list contained fake agencies exhibited less agency awareness overclaiming than respondents who were not warned.