Public health in action: effective school health needs renewed international attention

School health programmes as a platform to deliver high-impact health interventions are currently underrated by decision makers and do not get adequate attention from the international public health community. We describe the award-winning Fit for School Approach from the Philippines as an example of a large-scale, integrated, cost-effective and evidence-based programme that bridges the gap between sectors, and between evidence and practice. In view of the challenges to achieve the health and education related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in many countries, intensified efforts are required. We present the Fit for School Action Framework as a realistic and tested approach that helps to make schools places of public health for children and wider communities

Qualitative data analysis in cross-cultural projects

Large-scale research projects, conducted in a cross-European context, are increasingly attractive to educational researchers and policy-makers. However, this form of comparative research across cultures brings problems concerning the standardization of data collection and analysis, particularly where ethnographic research is concerned, as it prioritizes a full range of qualitative research strategies. This paper outlines the use of a universal model and the approaches recently taken by two research teams and contrasts these with another recent nine-partner comparative European study that used ethnographic methods. We then describe the analytical procedures used in the project, which encouraged participant observation and individual researcher interpretation in order to generate grounded accounts and outline how they were culturally sensitive and meaningful to research teams who used varied analytical approaches. However, this raised difficult issues for the 'final' analysis and the production of a loosely coupled research report. Our pragmatic solution was a process of 'qualitative synthesis' whereby individual partner reports were collated by the Project Director and treated as data and a grounded theory approach was applied to generate tentative theory in respect of creative learning. The paper concludes by arguing that data generated by a loosely coupled approach to qualitative comparative research which uses a wide range of data collection methods can be effectively analysed with a qualitative synthesis

Analysing children's drawings: applied imagination

This article centres on a research project in which freehand drawings provided a richly creative and colourful data source of children’s imagined, ideal learning environments. Issues concerning the analysis of the visual data are discussed, in particular how imaginative content was analysed and how the analytical process was dependent on an accompanying, secondary data source comprising brief, explanatory written texts