Long-term impact of worker notification: qualitative assessment of a community-based notification and screening program in Augusta, Georgia.

Background: Evaluation of high-risk worker notification programs often focuses on their immediate effectiveness in communicating information to individual workers. This approach leaves unexamined some important social processes that can influence worker notification's impact and public health consequences over time.

Methods: To explore long-term effects, ethnographic methods were used for qualitative assessment of a community-based program carried out by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Augusta, Georgia, during the early 1980s.

Applied epidemiology and environmental health: emerging controversies.

This review article assesses the state of the science in environmental epidemiology, not by summarizing current scientific findings but rather by examining conceptual controversies in the study of how environmental factors influence human health. This approach seems necessary because environmental epidemiology presently stands at a crossroads-in fact, at a number of overlapping crossroads. The field teems with epistemologic debates concerning appropriate paradigms for framing research questions, interpreting data, and applying research findings to policy.

Overcoming practical challenges in intervention research in occupational health and safety.

In addition to more familiar research issues, intervention research projects in naturalistic settings present the investigator with a number of practical challenges including gaining access to potentially resistant populations, maximizing participation rates in the face of weak incentives for cooperation, getting valid answers to sensitive questions, and meeting ethical obligations when health or legal problems are discovered in the course of study. Generalizable approaches to these challenges are addressed in the context of a retrospective evaluation of the implementation of OSHA's 1984 ethylene oxide standard in Massachusetts hospitals. In the evaluation study, enthusiastic cooperation was secured, a 96% participation rate was realized, sensitive questions were posed successfully, and worker health risks discovered in the course of study received attention without having to wait for the write-up of the study results.

Qualitative methods for intervention research.

Intervention research takes place in field settings and requires understanding of social meanings and social processes. These are tasks for which qualitative research methods are well suited. The purpose of this paper is to provide a starting point for those who would like to learn more about the qualitative research methods used in disciplines where the study of social phenomena in naturalistic settings is common-particularly sociology, cultural anthropology, and human services program evaluation.