Printed in Great Britain Implications of a health promotion framework for research on breastfeeding

The dramatic increase in the prevalence of breastfeeding within the past 15 years has been accompanied by an equally marked increase in research that has examined the psychological, social and cultural influences on decisions to initiate breastfeeding and the duration of breastfeeding. This article examines the nature and findings of this research from the perspective of a health promotion framework. There is a notable lack of research that elucidates the interplay between socio-cultural and personal influences on breastfeeding behaviour, the day-by-day context in which breast-feeding occurs and the way in which this context influences the configurations of meanings that are asso-ciated with women's experiences. It is suggested that these gaps occur in part because the design of research on breastfeeding is heavily influenced by the tradition of logical positivism, which assumes that human be-haviour can be described objectively, manipulated, controlled and studied in the same way as other natural events. It is further suggested that an increased use of research designs based on the tradition of hermeneutics can redress some of the inadequacies of current research. Such approaches seek to describe human action in order to acquire an interpretive understanding of motives and meanings that individuals assign to their actions. An example of breastfeeding research based on an interpretive paradigm is presented in the next article