Evaluating Australian Indigenous community health promotion initiatives: a selective review

Effective health promotion interventions are critical to addressing the health needs of Indigenous people. This article reviews published and unpublished evaluation reports between 2000 and 2005 to identify practice issues pertinent to evaluators of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health promotion initiatives. The review finds that published evaluation literature infrequently refers to the use of guidelines for ethical research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, indicating that the importance and relevance of such guidelines are not being widely promoted or disseminated to evaluation practitioners. Evaluation studies are not always able to report conclusively on the impact and health outcomes of these interventions or programs. This is due mainly to limitations in evaluation design that in some cases are insufficiently robust to measure the complex and multifaceted interventions described.