Popular education for health promotion and community empowerment: a review of the literature

Abstract

While there is now general agreement that the most effective way to promote health and decrease health inequities is by creating more just economic, social and political conditions, there is much less agreement about concrete ways in which public health practitioners can work with communities to address inequities such as poverty, racism and powerlessness. Practical strategies are desperately needed. Popular education, also known as Freirian and empowerment education, has been used successfully to create more equitable conditions around the world for >50 years. Its use to improve health has been documented in the public health literature since the early 1980s. Nonetheless, it remains largely unknown and its potential unrealized in mainstream public health circles in the industrialized world. In order to explore the potential of popular education as a tool to address inequities and improve health, a systematic review of the peer-reviewed international literature was conducted. Findings revealed that popular education is an effective method for enhancing empowerment and improving health. However, the existing literature does not provide empirical evidence that popular education is more effective than traditional education at increasing health knowledge and empowerment and changing health behavior. In order to fully understand the potential of popular education as a tool to eliminate health inequities and to advocate effectively for its use, further studies are needed that utilize mixed methods, participatory approaches and experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

Pharmaceutical services and health promotion: how far have we gone and how are we faring? Scientific output in pharmaceutical studies

“…Regarding the fields of action proposed by the Ottawa Charter, the studies were centered on reorientation of the health systems and services and developing personal abilities while the remaining fields have only been poorly outlined. According to Wiggins (2011), empowerment is the key for health promotion whereas popular education is considered an effective method to increase it and, therefore, to improve health. Traditional education that offers information, leaflets and group lectures is important in order to inform patients about their disease; however, it is not enough (Holmström, Röing, 2010).…”

Finding Pathways to More Equitable and Meaningful Public-Scientist Partnerships

“…A specific recommendation was to provide connections to the methods and norms of Participatory Action Research (PAR), which emphasizes the need for reflexive practice and embodies a rich legacy of efforts to support community capacity and confront ethical issues in research (Greenwood andLevin 2006, Long et al 2015). PAR and a variety of related approaches sprang from the popular education movement and work led by Paulo Freire (1970), Orlando Fals-Borda (1987, and others, which emphasizes inclusion of groups that will be impacted by an action in the problem-solving and solution-generating dialogue (Wiggins 2012, Freire 1970. To support such approaches, café participants suggested that the association could offer training for scientists especially in humility, ethics, and cultural competency (Quigley et al 2015, Tervalon andMurrayGarcia 1998).…”

A systematic review on empowerment for healthy nutrition in health promotion

“…A secondary search was conducted within: (i) journals related to health promotion, participatory research and community psychology which were not registered in the databases; and (ii) the references of included studies and within the references of existing systematic and non-systematic reviews on empowerment and health promotion (14)(15)(16)(17)(18) . This procedure yielded the identification of eleven additional studies.…”