Population health intervention research: myths and misconceptions.

While great strides have been made in Population Health Intervention Research (PHIR), uptake by public health researchers has been suboptimal (Hawe and Potvin 2009; Di Ruggiero et al. 2017). Common PHIR myths account for some of this lag in uptake, and misconceptions lead researchers to forgo PHIR, since the challenges seem insurmountable. As a result, the most common type of population health research remains the non-interventional observational study.
Given that a ‘‘simple myth is more cognitively attractive than an overcomplicated correction’’ (Cook and Lewandowsky 2011), we will attempt to address a subset of myths with brevity, at the risk of oversimplification. Of course, in reality, the issues are more nuanced.