Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas: Values and Research

✍ Scribed by Louise Potvin, David V. Mcqueen, Mary Hall (auth.), Louise Potvin, David V. McQueen, Mary Hall, Ligia de Salazar, Laurie M. Anderson, Zulmira M.A. Hartz (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 340
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas: Values and Research

Practices from the Americas

Edited by Louise Potvin, David V. McQueen, and Mary Hall

More and more, health promotion is a crucial component of public health, to the extent that public health interventions are called on to prove their effectiveness and appraised for scientific validity, a practice many in the field consider self-defeating. Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas cogently demonstrates that scientific rigor and the goals of health promotion are less in conflict than commonly thought, synthesizing multiple traditions from countries throughout North, Central, and South America (and across the developed-to-developing-world continuum) for a volume that is both diverse in scope and unified in purpose.

The book’s examples—representing robust theoretical and practical literatures as well as initiatives from Rio de Janeiro to American Indian communities—explain why health promotion evaluation projects require different guidelines from mainstream evaluative work. The editors identify core humanitarian principles associated with health promotion (participation, empowerment, equity, sustainability, intersectoral action, multistrategy, and contextualism), while chapters highlight challenges that must be mastered to keep these principles and scientific objectives in sync, including:

• Building health promotion values into evaluation research projects.
• Expanding the use of evaluation in health promotion.
• Developing meaningful evaluation questions.
• Distinguishing between community-based participation research and evaluation-based participation.
• Evaluating specifically for equity.
• Designing initiatives to foster lasting social change.

The applied knowledge in Health Promotion Evaluation Practices in the Americas: Values and Research can bring the goals of intervention into sharper focus for practitioners, evaluators, and decision-makers and facilitate communication on all sides—necessary steps to progress from study findings to real-world action.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xvi
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction. Aligning Evaluation Research and Health Promotion Values: Practices from the Americas....Pages 1-9
Front Matter....Pages 11-11
Health Promotion in the Americas: Divergent and Common Ground....Pages 13-23
Practical Dilemmas for Health Promotion Evaluation....Pages 25-45
Front Matter....Pages 47-47
Developing Evaluation Questions: Beyond the Technical Issues....Pages 49-62
There Is More to Methodology than Method....Pages 63-80
A Realist Approach to the Systematic Review....Pages 81-100
From Knowledge to Action: Challenges and Opportunities for Increasing the Use of Evaluation in Health Promotion Policies and Practices....Pages 101-120
Front Matter....Pages 121-121
Figurative Thinking and Models: Tools for Participatory Evaluation....Pages 123-147
Dilemmas in Health Promotion Evaluation: Participation and Empowerment....Pages 149-178
Formative Evaluation and Community Empowerment Among American Indian/Alaska Natives....Pages 179-190
Intersectoral Approaches to Health Promotion in Cities....Pages 191-219
The Participatory Evaluation of Healthy Municipalities, Cities and Communities Initiatives in the Americas....Pages 221-236
Evaluating Health Promotion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: An Integrated Local Development Project....Pages 237-252
Multi-strategy in the Evaluation of Health Promotion Community Interventions: An Indicator of Quality....Pages 253-267
The Contribution of A Systematization Evaluative Approach to Implement A Health Promotion Project in Capela do Socorro, Sao Paulo, Brazil....Pages 269-284
Issues in Evaluating Equity....Pages 285-298
Context as a Fundamental Dimension of Health Promotion Program Evaluation....Pages 299-317
Conclusion....Pages 319-326
Back Matter....Pages 327-334

✦ Subjects

Health Promotion and Disease Prevention; Public Health/Gesundheitswesen