Health promotion and industry. Where interdisciplinary research meets reality

Health promotion and disease prevention programs are now a common part of worksite life. Their acceptance has been based more on faith than scientific evidence of their effectiveness or benefit to either the companies or the participants. Evaluation research in worksite health promotion offers an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the programs and should be done using the methods of several disciplines: organizational psychology, industrial hygiene, and health education. Because of the inherent difficulties in planning, developing goals and objectives, and measuring outputs in worksite health promotion programs, any effective evaluation will have to combine methods and approaches from each of these perspectives.