Intervention Research in Health Promotion: Methodological Issues

Population health intervention research focuses on the actions carried out by researchers in partnership with those involved in the intervention: health professionals, patients, caregivers, public policy makers and population communities. The diversity of actors shapes PHIR projects, testifies to the richness of this research and gives it a privileged place to analyze and intervene as precisely as possible in different contexts and populations. It also implies the need for a better understanding of how to intervene by taking into account the determinants of health in these interventions. The PHIR in health promotion in the field of cancer therefore proposes a paradigm shift, with a focus on the intervention and not the description of the problem and its causes. PHIR bases its theoretical foundations on the one hand on contributions and models of public health, and social sciences, and on his own contributions to theorize and build his own theoretical and methodological corpus. This presentation aims to clarify this paradigm shift and four methodological challenges of PHIR: 1/ the imperialism of epidemiology as a research model; 2/ the challenges of evaluating interventions through the complexity of the objects studied; 3/ issues related to partnerships between researchers and actors in the field without which research cannot be conducted; and finally, 4/ the challenges of publishing and exploiting this type of research. Through concrete examples, participants will be invited to understand the challenges of the PHIR methodology, and to analyse different concrete perspectives to address them. The first part will focus on four methodological issues cited and the PHIR's progress to address them. The second part will identify the participants’ representations on the methodological difficulties of PHIR through their own feedback. This discussion will link directly to the next presentation which will focus on the presentation of an intervention on nutrition.