Research Methods and Evaluation in Health Promotion

Course Description

Research Methods and Evaluation in Health Promotion is a comprehensive analysis and application of research methods and evaluation for health education and promotion practices. Students establish or advance their understanding of research and evaluation in health promotion through critical exploration of terminology, ethical considerations, and methodology, covering quantitative, qualitative and mixed approaches.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HSC is the Health Sciences prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the College of Health. It is offered at approximately 8 Florida institutions.

⚠ The queue title for this number is "Public Health Research"; UWF publishes it as "Research Methods and Evaluation in Health Promotion." The local title is narrower and more accurate — this is health promotion research and programme evaluation rather than public health research generally. Carry a syllabus.

Evaluation is the part of health promotion most often skipped and most often demanded. Funders require it, programmes rarely plan for it, and an intervention evaluated only by how many people attended tells you nothing about whether it worked. This course is where the difference between activity and effect gets taught.

⚠ The ethical considerations UWF names are not decoration. Health promotion research is done with communities, frequently vulnerable ones, and the boundary between programme evaluation and human-subjects research is genuinely blurry and is decided by a review board rather than by the researcher.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for a 3-semester-hour course. ⚠ Note what UWF does NOT publish anywhere in the HSC prefix: no fee notices on this entry, no "permission is required" marking, and no co-requisite blocks — which distinguishes it sharply from UWF's clinical health prefixes. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define research terminology used in health promotion.
• Distinguish research, programme evaluation, and quality improvement.
• Formulate a researchable question from a practice problem.
• Search and appraise the health promotion literature.
• Describe quantitative designs and what each can establish.
• Describe qualitative designs and their appropriate use.
• Describe mixed-methods approaches and why they are used.
• Design a survey instrument and evaluate its validity and reliability.
• Describe sampling approaches and their implications.
• Describe data collection methods including interviews and focus groups.
• Describe basic quantitative and qualitative analysis approaches.
• Distinguish process, impact, and outcome evaluation.
• Construct a logic model for a programme.
• Define measurable objectives and matching indicators.
• Design an evaluation plan for a health promotion programme.
• Describe formative and summative evaluation.
• Describe research ethics including informed consent and confidentiality.
• Describe institutional review board requirements and when they apply.
• Describe community-based participatory research principles.
• Report findings appropriately to academic and community audiences.
• Critique published health promotion research.

Optional Outcomes

• Relate the material to a Florida county using local data.
• Describe how the topic maps onto NCHEC Areas of Responsibility.
• Evaluate a current research paper in the topic area.
• Describe emerging developments likely to affect practice.
• Apply the material to your own intended career route.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Research terminology
• Research, evaluation, and quality improvement
• Formulating a research question
• Literature search and appraisal
• Quantitative designs
• Qualitative designs
• Mixed methods
• Survey design, validity, reliability
• Sampling
• Interviews and focus groups
• Analysis approaches
• Process, impact, outcome evaluation
• Logic models
• Measurable objectives and indicators
• Evaluation planning
• Formative and summative evaluation
• Research ethics
• IRB requirements
• Community-based participatory research
• Reporting to different audiences
• Critique

Optional Topics

• Florida county-level application
• NCHEC Areas of Responsibility mapping
• Current research
• Emerging developments
• Career application

Resources & Tools

• A health research methods text — whichever the instructor assigns; Cottrell and McKenzie is common in health education programmes.
• CDC Framework for Program Evaluation — free; the standard structure, and directly usable for an assignment.
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Development Guide — free; the clearest available explanation of logic models, and the one practitioners actually use.
• CASP appraisal checklists — free; structured tools by study design.
• The UWF IRB pages — ⚠ read them before designing anything involving people; retrospective approval does not exist.
• A UWF librarian — included in enrolment, and an hour at the search stage saves days later.
• Florida CHARTS (flhealthcharts.gov) — free; county-level health data for every Florida county, and the natural source for any local application.
• NCHEC (nchec.org) — free; the CHES Areas of Responsibility and eligibility requirements. Read them early.
• CDC (cdc.gov) — free; surveillance data, guidance, and the free Principles of Epidemiology self-study course.

Career Pathways

• Health education specialists — SOC 21-1091; the direct destination, and the role CHES certification exists for.
• Community health workers — SOC 21-1094.
• Florida county health departments and the Florida Department of Health — the largest public employer of this training in the state, and the route into outbreak response, chronic disease programmes, and community assessment.
• Hospital and health system community-benefit roles — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist Health, and in UWF's own region Baptist Health Care and Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola. ⚠ Non-profit hospitals are federally required to conduct community health needs assessments, which is directly this skill set.
• Worksite wellness and employee health programmes — a substantial private-sector route, including Florida's large hospitality and tourism employers.
• Non-profit and community organisations — American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and local coalitions.
• Health insurers and managed care — member health and disease management programmes.
• School health education — ⚠ teaching health in Florida K-12 schools requires state teacher certification, which a health science degree alone does not provide. Plan the education route deliberately if this is the goal.
• Graduate pathways — MPH, health administration, physician assistant, and clinical programmes; this prefix is a common pre-health undergraduate route.
• ⚠ An honest note on entry-level work. Health education roles frequently start as grant-funded positions with fixed terms, and continuation depends on the grant rather than on performance. That is normal in the field and worth knowing before the first job rather than after it.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The credential this degree points at: CHES

• The Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES) credential, awarded by NCHEC, is the standard professional certification for health education graduates — the health-education counterpart of NCLEX for nursing or ASCP certification for laboratory science.
• ⚠ Eligibility is based on coursework rather than on a specific degree title. A candidate must hold a bachelor's degree and show a required number of semester hours addressing NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility. Which courses count is determined by content, so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions — they are the evidence.
• The Areas of Responsibility map closely onto this prefix: assessment of needs and capacity, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, advocacy, communication, and leadership and management. Most HSC courses are addressing one of them deliberately.
• ⚠⚠ Check eligibility before your final year, not after graduating. If a required area is not covered by your plan, it is far easier to add a course than to remediate afterwards.
• MCHES is the advanced credential, requiring experience beyond the entry-level certification.
• ⚠ Public health has a parallel route: the CPH credential from the National Board of Public Health Examiners, generally aimed at those with public health degrees. Health education and public health are related and are not the same field — see the note on that distinction below.

⚠⚠ Health education and public health are related fields, not interchangeable ones

• This matters here because the statewide inventory and UWF name these courses differently in ways that cross the boundary — the queue title for HSC3032, for instance, is "Foundations of Public Health" while UWF publishes "Foundations in Health Education."
• Public health is the broader field, encompassing epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, policy and management, and health behaviour. Health education and promotion is one of its components, focused on behaviour change, programme planning, and community capacity.
• ⚠ The credentials differ — CHES for health education, CPH for public health — and the graduate routes differ too: an MPH is the standard public health qualification, while health education has its own master's pathways.
• ⚠⚠ Do not assume a course satisfies a requirement written against the other field's name. Carry a syllabus, and check with the receiving programme or the credentialing body rather than matching on a title.

⚠⚠ Evaluation questions that separate activity from effect

• Attendance is not an outcome. Process measures — how many came, how many materials were distributed — describe delivery, not effect, and reporting them as success is the field's most common evaluation failure.
• ⚠ Define the outcome measure before implementing, not after. Choosing a measure once the results are visible is how programmes report success that did not happen.
• ⚠⚠ A pre-post change without a comparison group is weak evidence. People change over time anyway, the most motivated volunteer first, and regression to the mean flatters any programme that recruits people at their worst.
• Self-reported behaviour is systematically biased toward what the participant believes is desirable, and this is well documented in health research.
• ⚠ Negative results are results. An honest evaluation showing no effect is more useful than a positive one built on weak measurement — and publication bias in this field means the literature overstates what works.

⚠⚠ The research-versus-evaluation boundary is decided by a review board, not by you

• Programme evaluation and human-subjects research are treated differently, and the line between them is genuinely blurry.
• ⚠⚠ The determination is made by the institutional review board, not by the investigator. Ask early — a project that turns out to have needed approval cannot obtain it afterwards, and the data may be unusable.
• ⚠ Vulnerable populations trigger additional protections — minors, prisoners, pregnant people, and those with impaired capacity.
• Communities are frequently over-researched and under-served. Collecting data and leaving is a real harm, and community-based participatory principles exist as a response to it.

⚠⚠ Health data invites causal error, and this is the field where it does damage

• Association is not causation, and most population health data is observational.
• ⚠ Confounding by socioeconomic position is pervasive. An analysis that attributes an outcome to a behaviour without accounting for income, education, housing and access usually ends up blaming the affected population for a structural problem.
• ⚠⚠ The ecological fallacy is the specific trap — inferring something about individuals from a group-level pattern. Two things being common in the same county does not mean the same people have both.
• Statistical significance is not practical importance. A large dataset detects differences too small to act on.
• ⚠ Health information is a crowded and unreliable environment. Distinguishing evidence from advocacy, and both from marketing, is a core professional skill rather than a classroom exercise.

⚠⚠ Social determinants dominate outcomes, and the field has to say so

• Medical care is a modest contributor to population health outcomes compared with income, housing, education, food security and environment. That finding is robust and is inconvenient for a system organised around treatment.
• ⚠⚠ An intervention that ignores determinants fails and then blames the participant. "Non-adherence" is frequently a description of a barrier the programme did not assess — transport, cost, working hours, childcare, literacy, or trust.
• ⚠ Florida is a Medicaid non-expansion state, which leaves a documented coverage gap for adults earning too much for Medicaid and too little for subsidies. Anyone working in community health here meets that gap constantly, and knowing the real referral routes — federally qualified health centres, free clinics, county health departments — is practical knowledge.
• Health disparities in Florida are documented and specific, and vary sharply by county, race and rurality. Florida CHARTS makes this visible at county level and is the natural starting point.
• ⚠ Cultural humility beats cultural competence as a working stance — asking the person in front of you rather than applying a group characteristic.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture and discussion; assessment normally combines examination with applied written work.
• ⚠ No permission marking, no fee notice, and no co-requisite is published for this course — HSC is a lighter-touch prefix than UWF's clinical health prefixes, and enrolment is not gated on cohort admission.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. ⚠ For health sciences there is an additional consideration: CHES eligibility is assessed on course content against NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility, not on course titles or numbers — so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions for every health course you take, because they are the evidence a credentialing body will want.

HSC4730 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.