ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to comply with Rawson’s (2002) call for a debate between health promotion frameworks and their philosophical foundations rather than continuing to focus on models within frameworks. It is also concerned to identify and apply criteria for appraising health promotion frameworks to help establish what makes a theoretically robust structure. It does these tasks in the following ways. In borrowing from Piper’s (2004) unpublished qualitative theory-testing research it first, identifies appropriate delineating terminology, defines what constitutes a framework of health promotion and establishes the relationship between these and theories and models. Second, the quality assessment criteria (Greener and Grimshaw 1996), which are used to judge and compare their theoretical rigour, breadth and depth, are outlined. The criteria are for establishing how a health promotion framework can be internally validated as a benchmark by which to measure others, i.e. to develop, synthesise and validate the framework of the book as a tool for operational use by nurses and to gauge its ‘fitness for practice’ and the credentials of competing frameworks.
