Network analysis of the concept of health promotion capacity-building

Abstract

ABSTRACT Health promotion capacity-building (HPCB) emerged in the public health literature in the 1990s. The objective of this study was to examine the origins and show the developments of the concept in the twenty years following the seminal work. Citation network consisting of 230 texts was constructed in two phases. Texts identified in Phase A were articles with all of the words health, promotion, capacity, and building in their title (n = 79). In Phase B all texts that were cited by more than one phase A text (n = 151) were added to the population. Three quantitative methods - main-path analysis, k-core decomposition, and community detection - were used to identify the strongest path, the core of the network and distinct cliques within the network, respectively. The intellectual source was traced to the diffusion of innovations theory. All dimensions of HPCB could be traced back to the seminal work on the adoption of innovations in organizations. The single strongest path of more recent applications focused on global level HPCB. However, the majority of the more recent texts highlighted in the analyses were associated with community capacity-building. Other recent developments detected were organizational development, workforce development, health promoting schools, and a German Kapazitätsentwicklung application. These results suggest that HPCB has on the one hand given birth to a global-level core competencies approach, while on the other hand it has mostly focused on community capacity-building. As a consequence, other scenarios have received considerably less attention.