Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Within public health, health promotion (HP) is a recent field that stems from the confluence of multiple disciplines, including notably public health, sociology, psychology, political sciences and education. This multidisciplinarity has created great debate on the definition, role and functions of HP. This unfortunately contributes to the slowing progress of HP's development and institutionalization. The aim of this project is thus to provide a complementary empirical perspective to this primarily conceptual debate. We used a three-pronged approach: (1) we developed a citation analysis to examine the most cited journals within Health Promotion International in 2013-2014; (2) we surveyed an international panel of HP scholars (n = 27) on the ten journals most relevant to their work; (2) we developed a lexical analysis of the most prevalent words among these journals' abstracts. We then examined similarities among scholars' choices, abstracts' words and references. We found that only one journal, Health Promotion International, was voted by more than 75% of our sample. We also found that research was often segregated into distinct subgroups, underlying some of the core tensions in the field. These results indicate that multidisciplinarity is a key feature of HP research and practice. If embraced, it can strengthen HP by enriching our understanding of health and social issues from a variety of perspectives. However, multidisciplinarity may also divide experts into specific disciplinary silos lacking a common field. To address this issue, we propose that more academic venues and institutions should be developed specifically to facilitate such work.