ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 identifies four key philosophically rooted practical challenges faced by population health science. These include specific tactical choices about matters of research practice, and overarching challenges about how population health science charts a course within the existing scientific and sociopolitical landscape. The four challenges featured in the chapter are: (1) how to equitably choose boundaries for the population one researches, given populations’ heterogeneity; (2) how to balance programs aimed at high-risk populations with programs aimed at the wider population; (3) how to reconcile tensions between programs that treat population health improvement as the ultimate goals vs. programs that treat that goal as a means of fixing inefficient healthcare systems; (4) how to reconcile the desire for “evidence-based medicine” controlled experiments with the difficulty of gathering such evidence about the social determinants of health. The chapter’s case study illustrates the issues featured in the chapter by examining ongoing research into the heterogeneity of migrants’ health.
