Reflexive Relations and the Contested Creation of Epistemic Diversity in the Safe Motherhood Initiative

Dominique Béhague, Katerini Storeng

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the demand for experimentally derived evidence of the impact and cost-effectiveness of proposed public health interventions has grown exponentially, often to the exclusion of other epistemological traditions within epidemiology and allied social science disciplines (Lambert et al., 2006). Epidemiologists who bemoan this development have argued that the shift towards impact research is undermining one of epidemiology’s core defining features and strengths, namely the interest in multivariate understandings of the interconnected biological, social, political, and economic determinants of health (Davey Smith et al., 2001; Victora et al., 2004; McPake, 2006). Though experimental evidence theoretically provides definitive proof of the causal links between intervention and impact, critics note that the kinds of health interventions now being routinely proposed in global public health are becoming increasingly technocratic and divorced from known distal (social and economic) determinants of health in part because of the demand that they be experimentally trialled (Travis et al., 2004).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMethodological Challenges and New Approaches to Research in International Development
EditorsLaura Camfield
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages283-308
ISBN (Electronic) 9781137293626
ISBN (Print)9781349451272
Publication statusPublished - 2014

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