CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 335Qualitative Research Methods and ApplicationsHistorical and modern epidemiology studiesMethodologies in Health Research and Practice

Researching public health: Behind the qualitative-quantitative methodological debate

Baum, Frances·1995·Social Science & Medicine
DOI 10.1016/0277-9536(94)e0103-y
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Debates about appropriate methodologies for studying public health problems have tended to be polarized. Traditionalists, advocating the use of epidemiology and other methods drawn from a reductionist research tradition have tended to devalue the potential contribution of more interpretive research methods. Those advocating the use of more qualitative methods have often established the legitimacy of these methods by criticising the contribution of quantitative techniques. These debates often mask more fundamental differences in epistemology and approaches to dealing with the issues of power raised by research which aims to be compatible with the philosophy of the new public health. This paper argues that these underlying issues are crucial to contemporary public health debates and the methods are simply tools that are used to further knowledge and have no inherent status as sound or unsound. Public health problems result from complex social, economic, political, biological, genetic and environmental causes. A range of methods are needed to tackle these and public health researchers are most effective when they are eclectic in their choice of methods.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/0277-9536(94)e0103-y

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The interpretive approach provided rich accounts of local implementations which, when combined across sites, produced generic insights (not conventional generalizations) about different approaches to implementing national EHR initiatives and the sense of achievements attained.

    “This fundamentally interpretive approach provided a set of rich accounts of local implementations which, when combined across sites, led to the production of generic insights, albeit not the conventional generalizations, concerning the different approaches to the implementation of national EHR initiatives and the sense of achievements attained [63].”

    From Building a house on shifting sand: methodological considerations when evaluating the implementation and adoption of national electronic health record systems (2012) · cites this paper as [63]

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Baum, F.
Venue
Social Science & Medicine
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1995-02
Volume
40
Issue
4
Pages
459-468
ISSN
0277-9536 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/0277-9536(94)e0103-y
OpenAlex
W2024229463
Cited by
335
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 10
FWCI
68.20
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Social Science & Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Education › Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Historical and modern epidemiology studies
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Methodologies in Health Research and Practice
Keywords
epistemology of research, power in research, new public health, reductionism, methodological pluralism
MeSH terms
Humans, Public Health, Research Design, Sociology

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review