Critical Public Health
   Issue:   Volume 15, Number 1 / March 2005
   Pages:   5 - 17

Beyond the divides: Towards critical population health research

Ronald Labonte A1, Michael Polanyi A2, Nazeem Muhajarine A3, Tom McIntosh
A4, Allison Williams A5

A1 University of Ottawa, Canada
A2 Canadian Social Development, KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice
Initiatives, Canada
A3 University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
A4 University of Regina, Regina, Canada
A5 McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada


Abstract:

The term ‘population health’ has supplanted that of public health and
health promotion in many Anglophone countries. The ideas underlying the
term are not new and owe much to the legacies of nineteenth-century public
health radicalism, Latin American social medicine and, more recently,
social epidemiology. Its influential modeling by the Canadian Institute for
Advanced Research in the early 1990s, however, was criticized for a lack of
theory, reliance on large data sets, a simplistic modeling of the
healthcare/economy relationship, little attention to the physical
environment and an absence of human agency. While researchers working under
the rubric of population health have addressed many of these early
limitations, there has yet to be an articulation of what comprises a
critical population health research practice. This article, based on the
discussions and work of an interdisciplinary group of researchers in the
Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit (SPHERU) in
Canada, argues that s
uch a practice proceeds from a theoretical engagement (theories of
knowledge, society and social change), community engagement (a
politicization of research knowledge) and policy engagement (which must
extend beyond the simplistic notions of ‘knowledge translation’ that now
permeate the research communities). A critical population health research
practice, it concludes, is a moral praxis built upon explicit social values
and analyses.