Research design and analysis issues

The overall perspective of this article is the need for researchers of school-based health promotion to make more progressive use of existing statistical methods to improve both the rigor and the efficiency of school-based experiments. Investigative teams working in the school setting have an advantage over health education researchers working in communities or worksites in that they have greater choice of the experimental unit and usually easier access to large clusters of units. They are, therefore, in a position to make optimal use of a wide variety of experimental designs and observation strategies. In order to make full use of this advantage, however, researchers in this field need to assemble multidisciplinary teams, including researchers from other fields who are not restricted by the traditional approaches evident in many of the current school studies. Such teams should include statisticians and epidemiologists who have broadly-based experimental design and survey experience to work with the health educators and other behavioral and biomedical scientists.