Health visiting: action research in a controlled environment.
The nature of health visiting is discussed. It operates in a radically different way from any of the curative services. Research into the effectiveness of health visiting must therefore take into account the many differences in context, in professional goals and in the nature of the interaction between health visitors and their "clients", compared with the work of the curative professions within their more controlled and controlling environments. The evaluation of one large scale health visitor intervention study is used here to highlight these differences. Health visiting research needs to free itself from the attempts by some to apply the laboratory model of evaluation, if it is to develop a corpus of "action research" thinking which reflects its more human and developmental characteristics.
Barker
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Early Childhood Development Unit, School of Applied Social Studies, University of Bristol, U.K.
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003152:Community Health Nursing / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D011209:Power, Psychological; D006113:United Kingdom