Health promotion research: dilemmas and challenges

OBJECTIVE—To analyse dilemmas and challenges in health promotion research, and to generate ideas for future development.
METHOD—The analysis is based on authors' experiences in working in the field of research and action in health promotion and on experiences of others as found in literature.
RESULTS—The assumptions underlying scientific research as based in the biomedical design are difficult to meet in community-based health promotion research. Dilemmas are identified in relation to the possibility of defining the independent and dependent variables beforehand and the intermingling of these variables (the intervention and outcome dilemma), the difficulty in quantifying the desired outcomes (the number dilemma), and the problem of diffusion of the programme to the control group (the control group dilemma).
CONCLUSION—Research in health promotion has specific reasons to reconsider the approach towards research, the selection of outcome variables, and research techniques. Strategies and methods to make activities and their outcomes clear are discussed and criteria to judge confidence and applicability of research findings are presented.


Keywords: health promotion research; research dilemmas; research challenge

A four step health promotion approach for changing dietary patterns in Europe.

Nutrition policies to prevent nutrition-related diseases already exist in many countries. Not many countries have been successful in implementing their dietary recommendations, mainly because of the individual focus of nutrition education policies. Experts have been telling people what foods are good for them but have failed to build a supportive environment which would enable people to exercise a healthy choice. This article identifies four steps to a new approach for nutrition promotion. It is based on the idea that a multi-disciplinary approach and promotional activities linked to existing social networks on an individual level close to daily life will be more effective than traditional nutrition education. As an example in this field the SUPER-project, a community based five-country nutrition promotion project is described. This project, based on the four steps described in the article, is being carried out in five different experimental situations to produce a working model for this approach