Developing methodologies for evaluating community-wide health promotion

Abstract

There has been growing recognition that health promotion programs which target whole communities are more likely to be effective in changing health behaviour. However, studies evaluating the impact of community-wide health promotion programs rarely use adequate methodology. Randomised control trials where multiple whole communities are randomly assigned to control and intervention groups are optimum if evaluators hope to validly attribute changes in health behaviour to the intervention. However, such trials present a number of difficulties including cost and feasibility limitations and the evolving nature of statistical techniques. This paper proposes applying a fairly well-accepted phased e..