Beyond the divides: Towards critical population health research

The term ‘population health’ has supplanted that of public health and health promotion in many Anglophone countries. The ideas underlying the term are not new and owe much to the legacies of nineteenth-century public health radicalism, Latin American social medicine and, more recently, social epidemiology. Its influential modeling by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the early 1990s, however, was criticized for a lack of theory, reliance on large data sets, a simplistic modeling of the healthcare/economy relationship, little attention to the physical environment and an absence of human agency. While researchers working under the rubric of population health have addressed many of these early limitations, there has yet to be an articulation of what comprises a critical population health research practice. This article, based on the discussions and work of an interdisciplinary group of researchers in the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit (SPHERU) in Canada, argues that such a practice proceeds from a theoretical engagement (theories of knowledge, society and social change), community engagement (a politicization of research knowledge) and policy engagement (which must extend beyond the simplistic notions of ‘knowledge translation’ that now permeate the research communities). A critical population health research practice, it concludes, is a moral praxis built upon explicit social values and analyses.