Statistics are directly relevant to the planning of health promotion interventions because they are paramount for identifying the groups that need such interventions in the first place. Learning more about a given group is actually one of the main uses of statistics in public health (Bruce, Pope, & Stanistreet, 2018). For example, if one aims to design a health promotion intervention against intimate partner violence (IPV), one needs to know which, if any, groups are disproportionally affected by it. Data from the Center for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC) demonstrate that women are approximately 2.5 times as likely to be victims of IPV as men (CDC, 2020). Thus, statistics demonstrate that intervention against IPV has to primarily target women as a more vulnerable demographic.
In terms of implementing a health promotion intervention, statistics are important as well. No intervention is entirely smooth and without its setbacks, and barriers to implementation are bound to arise in one form or another. Statistics are essential to identify these barriers and account for them. Using the example above, statistics may demonstrate that individualistic approaches to treating the victims of IPV prove unsuccessful in more collectivist cultures (Varcoe et al., 2019). In this respect, the implementation of health promotion intervention relies on statistics as much as planning.
Finally, statistics are indispensable for evaluating the outcome of an intervention. Virtually every criterion that allows designating an intervention as success or failure is statistical. Statistics gathered through the follow-up procedures provide information on the outcomes, such as the rate of improvement or its length (Varcoe et al., 2019). Administrative statistics demonstrate whether an intervention is economically feasible from the cost and effect perspective (Varcoe et al., 2019). If anything, statistics is even more important in evaluating an intervention than it is in planning and implementing it.
References
Bruce, N., Pope, D., & Stanistreet, D. (2018). Quantitative methods for health research A practical interactive guide to epidemiology and statistics (2nd ed.) Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2020). Preventing intimate partner violence.
Varcoe, C., Ford-Gilboe, M., Browne, L. G., Perrin, N., Bungay, V., McKenzie, H., Smye, V., Elder, I. P., Inyallie, J., Khan, K., & Atout, M. D. (2019). The efficacy of a health promotion intervention for Indigenous women: Reclaiming our spirits. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 886260518820818.