Conclusion: Characterising the Field of Health Promotion Research

Abstract

Our project with this handbook was to map out health promotion research practices using a bottom-up approach, giving a space to researchers who identify as health promotion researchers to describe and reflect on their research practices. The contributing chapters have been organised into 45 complete chapters, and nine short reports grouped in Chaps. 8 and 34. These were produced by teams from 27 countries and territories from five continents. For this mapping exercise, our ambition was not to define the “right way” to do health promotion research but rather to identify its distinctive features on the basis of the contributions collated in this book. It is about making the framework explicit rather than trying to achieve consensus about the relevant paradigms, tools, and methods. Our approach was to look for markers to characterise the field. The analysis of the contributions shows a real diversity of research practices and led us to identify 11 markers that fall under the three structuring dimensions we used to define the field of health promotion research: the ethical references, the objects of enquiry, and the epistemological configurations. The present work is a first attempt to characterise this field of research.