What’s in a Name: Is this an Appropriate Response?

Abstract

I n their introduction to our new journal, Randy Schwartz and Bob Goodman (2000) provide us with three reasons for the choice of the term health promotion rather than health education for the journal's title. They begin by stating that for some, a debate over these two terms is still relevant. As one of the some, I offer some thoughts about why health educators should consider a debate to be relevant using the three explanations provided by these authors. The first reason cited by Schwartz and Goodman (2000), which they call a practical one, is that the abbreviation for a health education practice (HEP) journal would be too close to that of our other journal, Health Education and Behavior (HEB), and thus would be a source of possible confusion. Regrettably, practicality is often inevitable and, in fact, was even used at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the Health Education Network (HEN) decided that its abbreviation was not very complimentary (and possibly sexist as well!). As with the journal title, the Network decided to add the word promotion to the name of the organization, which then became the Public Health Education and Promotion Network or PHEP-NET. The other two explanations by the authors are of greater concern. Their characterization of health education in relation to health promotion may unwittingly undermine the contributions of health education to the field of health promotion. For those who are not familiar with health education as it has been developed in the United States over the past 40 to 50 years, such characterization may further minimize the science and practice of health education as a core discipline of public health. Such minimization may tend to encourage an erroneous interchangeability of the two terms— implied by the question, “What is in a name?”—rather than an appreciation of the complementary roles that each has in improving the public's health. Lest readers be thinking “oh no, another health educator having a professional identity crisis,” let me assure you that this is not the case. With the advent of certification for health educators, the recognition of health educator as a manpower classification by the Department of Labor, and the recent work done for the development of the profession cited by Schwartz and Goodman (2000), my concern about the explanations provided for the choice of journal title is not fueled by a paranoia that the profession of health education will be replaced by that of health promotion. Rather, it is spurred by my feeling that health educators, in their own journal, should be clearly articulating the contribution of the profession to the development of health promotion and thus giving credit where credit is due. These contributions include many decades of leadership and thinking, an ever increasing science base, and the professionalization of health education as a core function of public health. The second reason cited by Schwartz and Goodman (2000) is that, “on a broader level,” the choice of health promotion is “in accordance with the definition offered by Green and Kreuter [1999], recently revised in the third edition of their classic book on health promotion planning.” However, when they contrast the definitions of health promotion and health education found on page 27 of the third edition, the authors do not mention the first edition of the book, Health Education Planning: A Diagnostic Approach (Green, Kreuter, Deeds, & Partridge), published in l980. Indeed, as a health education practitioner trained in that era, I found that the PRECEDE planning model published in this edition was robust enough to include the environmental and ecological dimensions that later appear in the second and third editions of Green et al.’s (1980) book. In commenting in the 1999 edition on the shift from health education to health promotion that occurred around the creation of the Federal Office of Health Information and Health Promotion, Green and Kreuter observe that the operational definition of health