Department of Natural Science & Public Health, College of Arts and Sciences, Zayed University, P.O. Box 4783, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Health Promot Int. 2011 Mar;26(1):82-90. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daq051. Epub 2010 Aug 18.
The Ottawa Charter laid the ground work for a new research and practice agenda by urging health promoters to advocate for healthy public policies. After more than 20 years, it is now time to reflect on the state of policy research in health promotion and to examine how rigorously theories are applied. The review of the literature was conducted on 11 peer-reviewed journals. The journals were selected for their solid track record in publishing health promotion articles and by using a set of pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The articles, published between January 1986 and June 2006, were searched using Medline and CINAHL databases. The selected papers feature search terms related to 'politics', 'policy', 'advocacy' and 'coalition'. We examined the theoretical grounding of each paper and whether it focuses on policy content (e.g. nature, impact, evolution of the policy), policy processes (e.g. advocacy capacity building and strategies) or theoretical/methodological issues in policy analysis. This review demonstrates that policy research in health promotion is still largely an a-theoretical enterprise. Out of the 119 articles that were found eligible, 39 did apply to some degree a theoretical framework, of which 21 referred to a theoretical framework from political science. We conclude that the field has yet to acknowledge critical concepts that would help to shed light on the policy process, and that validated rigorous theoretical frameworks to inform research and practice are hardly applied. Recommendations are formulated to improve policy research in health promotion.
《渥太华宪章》为新的研究和实践议程奠定了基础，敦促健康促进者倡导健康的公共政策。20 多年后，现在是时候反思健康促进政策研究的现状，并研究理论是如何被严格应用的。文献综述是在 11 份同行评议期刊上进行的。这些期刊之所以被选中，是因为它们在发表健康促进文章方面有着坚实的记录，并使用了一套预先确定的纳入和排除标准。这些发表于 1986 年 1 月至 2006 年 6 月之间的文章，使用 Medline 和 CINAHL 数据库进行了搜索。所选论文的主题词与“政治”、“政策”、“倡导”和“联盟”有关。我们检查了每篇论文的理论基础，以及它是否关注政策内容（如政策的性质、影响、演变）、政策过程（如倡导能力建设和策略）或政策分析中的理论/方法问题。这项综述表明，健康促进政策研究在很大程度上仍然是一种无理论的事业。在符合条件的 119 篇文章中，有 39 篇文章在某种程度上应用了理论框架，其中 21 篇文章提到了政治学的理论框架。我们得出的结论是，该领域尚未认识到有助于阐明政策过程的关键概念，也几乎没有应用经过验证的严格理论框架来为研究和实践提供信息。为改善健康促进政策研究提出了建议。
