ABSTRACT
Approaches to researching and evaluating the health promoting school (HPS) require a panoramic conception at the planning stage. Health promotion can take diverse forms, involve many agencies and be enacted in varied ways within both the formal and ‘contextual’ curricula of schools and in the broader community. It is also important to see the workings of health promotion conditioned by the wider and immediate institutional context, management and the processes used, which may then lead on to sought-after outcomes. An ecological and holistic view of the HPS demands both this breadth of vision and a dynamism that accepts changes over time. The full range of methodologies may be used in studying the HPS but it is important that outcomes are sought in terms of that full eco-holistic panorama of context, management, processes and relationships as well as competences and health-related behaviour changes in young people.
