Describe the school of thought known as positivism and explain its role in health education

Answer 1

In the school of thought known as positivism, it's held that only phenomena that can be directly and reliably assessed through sensory observation (seeing, hearing, etc.) are of interest to science. Positivists do not deny the existence of cognitive processes, but they question the extent to which they are relevant given that they are unique to the person who is thinking or feeling and are experienced only by that person. Thus, the validity of measuring constructs such as self-efficacy or health knowledge, central to health education in its traditional form, is challenged by this position. Positivists do not argue that the subjective personal experiences of one's actions and the environment in which they occur do not exist, nor are they unimportant in the grand scheme of life. Instead, positivists assert that only behaviors, physical or physiological outcomes, or other actions or their consequences that can be publicly observed in a reliable fashion are of interest to scientific inquiry. Health education theories that rely heavily on inferred psychological processes implicitly reject a positivistic approach, one that could contribute to their scientific quality and generalizability.?