LAUSR

I jumped at the opportunity to join the Critical Public Health editorial board as Co-Editor, a position I started in January 2017. I am primarily a quantitative researcher, which is a departure from the journal’s typical content. For example, of the 40 research articles published in the journal in 2016 (Volume 26), only one could be described as quantitative (Ballantyne, Casey, O’Hagan, & Vienneau, 2016). In my application for the Co-Editor position, I somewhat hesitantly stated that I might be positioned to help increase critical quantitative research submissions to the journal. But that got me thinking, what is critical quantitative research? Does it have a place in Critical Public Health, and what value does, or could, it bring? What are some of the challenges? Drawing from the journal’s website, ‘critical’ is about ‘exploring new ways of thinking about public health’. It is about ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘innovative’ approaches to ‘exploring and debating issues of equity, power, social justice and oppression in health’. Although nothing in that description excludes quantitative methods, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that some features associated with a quantitative approach (e.g. beliefs about truth, bias and the role of values) seem epistemologically at odds with critical inquiry. Critical scholars working in social epidemiology (e.g. O’Campo & Dunn, 2012) have highlighted this tension, between perceived objectivity of epidemiological research on the one hand and its ‘solution-oriented’ use in policy or advocacy on the other, as an important challenge to that field. Some have argued that there is no inherent incompatibility between quantitative methods and critical inquiry. In scholarship on higher education, Stage and Wells (2014), used the term ‘quantitative criticalist’ to describe quantitative scholars who ‘resisted the term positivist with its implications of fixed theoretical frameworks and prescriptive variable definitions’. Quantitative criticalists use quantitative data and methods1 to pursue research questions that, for example, reveal inequities and the social or institutional factors that create and perpetuate them. Critical quantitative scholarship may also question measures and analytic practices used in quantitative research, to ensure that they adequately represent circumstances and contexts, and do not themselves inadvertently perpetuate exclusion and hierarchy. A critique of social epidemiology (related to, but not the same as, critical quantitative inquiry) is that, despite being purportedly ‘social’, in practice it tends to be descriptive and downstream (O’Campo & Dunn, 2012). For example, it may focus on associations between some social indicator and some health outcome without consideration of the drivers of the association and corresponding implications for social change. This is not an inherent feature of quantitative methods, but rather reflects – in part – insufficient or non-explicit attention to theory. My quantitative mind leads me to think about ‘types’ of theories, ranging from intraor individual level theories used in the behavioural sciences, such as the Health Belief Model, through community or organizational level theories, to large-scale social or critical theories such as Feminism or Marxism, which represent the outermost of the concentric circles. I recall my own ‘aha’ moment when I realized that the social and critical theories are where the action is, and where one can question and challenge the status quo. Over a decade ago, Frohlich, Mykhalovskiy, Miller, and Daniel (2004) helpfully outlined different ways in which those ‘outer’ theories can be integrated into population/public health research: to frame and orient an entire research endeavour; to interpret emerging findings as demanded by the data; and to critique the arguments and interpretations of others. It seems reasonable that these different ways of using theory could be applied across methods.