Mixed Methods’ Contribution to the Evaluation of Health Promotion Initiatives in the School Setting

Abstract

The development of suitable approaches for evaluating health promotion in schools to produce useful evidence to enhance sustainability and transferability is still a major topic of discussion. There is currently a trend among health promotion researchers to develop evaluation approaches that are able to measure the impact of an initiative as well as to understand how this impact is obtained in order to inform the implementation of sustainable health promotion initiatives by practitioners and decision-makers from both health and education sectors. This chapter sets out to illustrate the contribution of mixed methods to take into account the complexity of school health promotion initiatives to help address the challenges faced by the field of school health promotion especially those related to evaluation, sustainability and transferability. Empirical data gathered from an intervention research implemented in the French context are used to highlight the interest of such a research strategy.