Chapman S
Department of Community Medicine, University of Sydney, Westmead Hospital, NSW, Australia.
BMJ. 1993 Aug 14;307(6901):429-32. doi: 10.1136/bmj.307.6901.429.
For about three decades countries such as Australia, Great Britain, and the United States have been turning up the heat on tobacco advertising. Encouraging, sometimes dramatic falls in consumption have followed. On any given day in 1993 smokers in such countries are exposed to a welter of news, information, persuasion, and policies designed to turn them off smoking. For a long time explanations and evaluations of the effects of these policies and interventions have been tied to oversimplified causal models when the reality is rather more messy and complicated. Four factors largely explain the reluctance of researchers to move beyond these models: the reductionist tradition of science; the explanatory privileging of recent events and factors; pragmatic concern for policy "tractable" factors; and the relation of funding to the evaluative process. Broader research approaches to understanding changes in complex behaviours such as smoking are required--for example, qualitative methods.
大约三十年来，澳大利亚、英国和美国等国家一直在加大对烟草广告的管控力度。随之而来的是，烟草消费量出现了令人鼓舞的下降，有时降幅颇为显著。在1993年的任何一天，这些国家的吸烟者都会接触到大量旨在劝诫他们戒烟的新闻、信息、宣传和政策。长期以来，对这些政策和干预措施效果的解释和评估都与过于简化的因果模型相关联，而实际情况要更加杂乱和复杂得多。有四个因素在很大程度上解释了研究人员不愿超越这些模型的原因：科学的还原论传统；对近期事件和因素的解释性偏好；对政策“可控”因素的务实关注；以及资金与评估过程的关系。需要采用更广泛的研究方法来理解诸如吸烟等复杂行为的变化——例如定性方法。
