Editors: Rebecca Armstrong, Elizabeth Waters and Jodie Doyle.
Key Points
Public health and health promotion interventions are broadly-defined activities that are evaluated using a wide variety of approaches and study designs, including cluster-randomized trials. For some questions, the best available evidence may be from non-randomized studies.
Searching for public health and health promotion literature can be a very complex task, and requires authors to use methods other than database searching to retrieve studies.
Systematic reviews of public health and health promotion interventions have the potential to investigate differential outcomes for groups with varying levels of disadvantage. However, addressing inequalities is complicated not only by limited collection of information about differences between groups, but also by the fact that there is limited participation of disadvantaged groups in research.
A further problem in reviewing public health and health promotion interventions is how to disentangle intervention effects from the influence of the context in which the intervention is implemented.
Information should be sought on contextual factors and on intervention characteristics that may explain the extent to which the intervention or outcomes are sustained.
21.4 Assessment of study quality and risk of bias
21.8 Applicability and transferability