Tools are a term that public health use to denote methods or methodologies.
Public Health is an interdiscipinary field comprising of epidemiology, statistics, medical anthropology,
medical sociology, medical pscyhology, health economics, management studies and medical sciences.
Each field brings its own theories, methodologies and epistemology (i.e. the type of knowledge being produced).
As a result, public health has a wide range of tools at its disposal.
This page acts as a source of information on the different tools that are available.
To find out about a particular tool, just click on its name on the tool shelf.
Toolkit also provides some information on how to conduct research. Given that my background is sociology, the emphasis
will be on social research methods. Many public health people incorrectly assume that medical sociological
approach is qualitative. Sociology like other sciences uses both induction (i.e. qualitative research such as focus groups, in-depth interivews)
and deductive logic (quantitative research like surveys, experiments, secondary statistical analysis).
The trick is to ask yourself at the onset of your project do you wish to test a theory or generalise
your findings to a wider population (e.g. "80% of women in the UK read women's magazines")or do you
want to devise a theory from your observations of how people feel or think about an issue? The former would be a
quantitative approach, the latter would use qualitative
methods.
Difference between quantitative and qualitative research
How to design a piece of research
Doing a Literature Review
Quantitative Analysis
Qualitative Analysis
Disclaimer:
Views expressed in this website are those of the author only. It is
not associated with the National Health Service (NHS) or any other
public bodies.
