Canada's health promotion survey as a milestone in public health research.

ABSTRACT

This commentary describes the contribution of the 1985 Canadian National Health Promotion Survey to the development of public health research and policy-making in Canada and argues that on the basis of that contribution, it should be considered to be a public health research milestone. In terms of research, among its contributions which subsequently have been adopted in other survey studies were going beyond risk factors to operationalize concepts implicit in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion; empowering users to participate in knowledge translation, sharing and transfer; ensuring sufficient sample sizes for each jurisdiction to be able to confidently generalize to its population; establishing a model as well as questions for subsequent health surveys; encouraging widespread use of data through making them available early; and developing and using an explicit social marketing strategy to reach target audiences, including the general public. With regard to policy-making, among its contributions which have been adopted were using survey data to develop and enhance healthy public policy initiatives; encouraging researchers to work with policy-makers in developing policies; using survey data to contribute to the evaluation of public health initiatives; engaging policy-makers in the development of surveys; and encouraging the use of survey data for advocacy.