Evaluation in health education. A review of progress, possibilities, and problems.

The quality of evaluation in health education has been an important obstacle to better interventions, and wider acknowledgement of the importance of health education in improving public health. In the past, the urgency of immediate health problems, the practical orientation of health educators, and the complex nature of evaluation in health education have usually meant that interventions were established on the basis of limited research, and with little or no consideration given to the need to evaluate. Progress in evaluation has been painfully slow. In the past two decades greater attention has been given to the need to evaluate, particularly in the United States, and there has been a corresponding development in the quality and range of examples of well evaluated health education projects and programmes. This paper has been developed on a review of the growing literature on the subject of evaluation in health education, and illustrates key