Introduction
We live in an age of fake news, when āfactsā are disputed, so well-conducted research has never been more important. Research that is poorly constructed wastes time and resources ā and research that does not use rigorous and well-founded practice can have a damaging effect on individuals and society. In this book, we aim to provide the ground rules for research and studies undertaken in the field of health. We cover research in both the clinical and the social sciences. Our view is that students, researchers, health professionals and policy makers should have an understanding of the methodologies and methods employed across the whole spectrum of research. Even if those undertaking or assessing research have chosen or favour a particular method to carry out a specific project, they should still be acquainted with other methods and the kind of knowledge that these different methods produce. They should also be able to evaluate whether a project has been carried out sufficiently well to support the findings put forward.
The findings of research should be based on evidence, and evidence in turn must be based on sound research processes ā even when there are challenges (Brown, Crawford and Hicks 2003). In this light:
- Undergraduate and postgraduate students and others should acquire the tools to assess how research findings have been reached and know how to āreadā a journal paper and other research output with a critical eye.
- If researchers plan to carry out a project themselves, they should be in a position to choose the tools that are most applicable to answering their research question. This means knowing how to select from the range available and to acquire the particular skills they will need.
- Most projects will in practice use a number of methods to collect and analyse data and require some ability to handle numbers as well as text. There is no clear quantitative and qualitative divide ā the two are not mutually exclusive.
- In the workplace, health professionals and policy makers must also be able to evaluate the quality of research findings. Such findings provide the basis for making decisions and/or providing advice to parties including policy makers, clients and patients.
To assist with these issues, the contributors to this book draw on their long experience of undertaking research. They provide many examples to show best practice and discuss how to deal with the difficult issues that can occur in conducting high-quality research.
This third edition of the book aims to provide an extended and updated guide to the range of ways in which readers may approach researching health. The volume contains a number of key improvements from the second edition following extensive international peer review. There are new chapters on the principles of health research, methods of sampling in qualitative health research, qualitative data analysis, using secondary data in health research, identity in health research, online research in health and evaluating health research to reflect the developing interests of those directly engaged in, studying and/or assessing research in health. In addition, all the existing chapters have been updated with new material. There is more emphasis on interdisciplinary health research as well as mixed methods ā which now appear as separate chapters rather than as a single chapter. The expanded number of chapters overall, as compared to both the first and second edition of Researching Health, draw on a wider array of top-quality contributors ā hailing from a diverse international range of eight different countries ā including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal and the United Kingdom (UK).
The Development of the Book
The book unfolds in a coherent and well-defined manner. After the opening chapters in Part I on how to conduct health research, Part II examines how qualitative methods have been used to research health, illness and the delivery of services in health care settings. In Part III, the quantitative methods used in health research to investigate health, illness and treatment for disease, and to assess the costs and benefits of interventions in health care, are discussed. In both of these sections, the aim is to describe the use of various methods in practice; the type of questions each method is intended to address; and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. This is followed by a consideration of the challenges likely to be encountered in carrying out research.
The book then turns in Part IV to consider selected issues in health research that have emerged as under-researched areas, such as that of identity, and where current research practice has faced a critical challenge, leading to ongoing debate. Questions about how to ensure ethical research practice and how to involve those who use health care in the research process remain areas of importance, but conflicts of interest may arise. For example, the interests of researchers may run counter to those of people who are the subjects of research. Moreover, even if there is agreement that ethics is a central issue in health research, and that a partnership between researchers and health care users offers a way forward, there are still practical problems about how this can best be achieved. This is especially sensitive in a comparative international context and in the era of the internet, and research issues that emerge in both of these areas are directly addressed in this section.
The concluding chapters, in Part V, crystallize the core themes of the book by focusing on applying health research, addressing specifically the issues of writing a research proposal, writing up research projects and disseminating findings. The final chapter also discusses how to evaluate health research papers and how to evaluate policy change. Throughout the book, we have aimed to engage with the practical problems of conducting research. In so doing, each of the ensuing chapters provides case study examples of health research in practice, drawn from the authorsā own research where appropriate. Our aim is to help readers to carry out their own research projects and, in so doing, draw on the research of others in their work.
Research into health ā and, by extension, illness and disease ā can be focused at many different levels in the historic and contemporary context: to name but a few, from the individual to the community, from the activities of patients as health producers to the contribution of informal carers, and from health care assistants with brief training to fully-fledged health professionals in the labour force. Health research can provide a critique to challenge existing policies and practice as well as being supportive of positive client-centred change on the ground in practice. As such, those concerned with research into health care may operate in a local, national and/or international context. This is reflected in the range of research undertaken in the health field, as well as in its applicability to different layers of government policy.
Research in Policy and Practice
From this viewpoint, we would emphasize that health research using a range of methods may be undertaken not only to gain an understanding of health, illness and disease in contemporary society, but also to contribute to policy development. In this regard, there has been a major change in the culture of health services in the developed world. Not only have clinical interventions become more evidence-based, but policy makers are more inclined to pivot their policies on interventions that are most effective (Kuhlmann and Saks 2008). Clinical science centred on a biomedical model of disea...
