ABSTRACT
As health promotion work has expanded in recent years so the accepted prescriptions for appraising health science and evaluating health interventions have proved to be inadequate. Theorists have either tended to search other disciplines for a scientific basis to their work (witness this volume) or else have concentrated on expounding the ideological basis of health promotion (compare, for example, the anthology in Rodmell and Watts 1986). Neither approach, however, has led to the creation of a corpus of knowledge particular to health promotion or to a coherent set of methods worthy of discipline status.
