Qualitative and quantitative approaches to health impact assessment: An analysis of the political and philosophical milieu of the multi-method approach

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Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a relatively new, but increasingly important, contributor to both local and national decision-making processes. Adopting a multi-method approach, it incorporates qualitative and quantitative analyses to determine the various health impacts of policies and projects. HIA thus reflects recent developments in sociological theory, which have promoted qualitative techniques and challenged the dominance of quantitative methods. HIA embodies a particular renegotiation of the qualitative/quantitative opposition; each individual HIA represents an empirical instance of this renegotiation. As such, HIA can be conceptualized as a kind of ‘political space’, in which the opposition in question is structured by various social forces and plays out in concrete ways. Moreover, and notwithstanding the supposed methodological rapprochement, an analysis of a number of HIAs claims to expose a continuing, but perhaps unsurprising, privilege in favour of quantitative methods. In the first place, the paper contends that closer examination reveals this privileging to be unjustified, both empirically and theoretically, and alternative methodological and epistemological configurations are suggested accordingly. Specific gestures are made in this respect toward the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. In particular, the paper argues for a broad hermeneutic approach that both encompasses and situates the methodological tensions HIA stages. Second, attention is drawn to the fact that various and particular sociopolitical conditions maintain the characteristic architecture of the opposition. The political importance of HIA across a series of key issues is underscored in support of a more radical interpretation. For once situated within its wider cultural context, HIA ceases to resemble some straightforwardly neutral technology for health protection and delivery. If, instead, one reads it as an indicative micropolitical phenomenon, then one can begin to interrogate this simple policy tool in more complex ways. HIA both reveals, and is implicated in, a more fundamental and diffuse process that is presently resisting, undermining and regenerating traditional power distributions within the administration of health and beyond. The paper implicitly argues that HIA can only be properly understood within this context and, equally, allows one a certain analytical access to this context.