Perspectives: what are the research needs?

regarding research took a turn from traditional debates on public health research. Louise Potvin referred to it clearly: ‘The Ottawa Charter identifies values and principles that place the population’s emancipation and participation as equally important processes to research findings. We believe … that these principles and values are becoming the parameters for effectiveness of action.’ We cannot just concentrate on traditional approaches, based on the classical biomedical model, to organize health services and programmes. Jacqueline Descarpentries suggests in her article on public health education interventions that intervention is based on ‘the social and historical realities that have been determined by states’ traditions, and national, global, economic, political and cultural factors, to construct the social conditions for health education.’ A key point of the debate concerns the place of epidemiology in health promotion reflection and research. In this regard, Louise Potvin shed light on the discussion: ‘The methodological discourse is largely dominated by epidemiology. In the public health conceptual universe, health promotion is restrained to justifying its research procedures based on epidemiology’s criteria’, but epidemiology’s methodological paradigm ‘is hardly compatible with the emancipation principles and values of the Ottawa Charter.’ As a consequence, she says, there are two ways to ensure the rigour of health promotion evaluation studies: on the one hand, as part of the epidemiology paradigm, by driving analysis on the basis of a strict definition of the evaluator’s range of control; and on the other hand, by moving away from the paradigm and implementing disciplines that aim to establish processes of social transformation.