ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the value of a postmodern perspective to understanding health promotion and the current debate on measuring its effectiveness. Although health promotion has developed from a mix of positivist disciplines-for example, medicine, epidemiology and behavioural psychology-and constructivist disciplines such as community development and community psychology (Labonte and Robertson 1996), it may be that the dominant tenets of health promotion are more consistent with the constructivist underpinnings of postmodernism than the positivist premises of evidence-based health care. If so, a postmodernist mode of enquiry can serve as a useful corrective to the outcomes research model in measuring the effectiveness of health promotion.
