This paper presents a critical review of selected literature about peer education initiatives with young people principally in the area of sexual health. Reported work in this area was found to be diverse in terms of aims, objectives, methods, findings and levels of evaluation. The paper highlights the promise of the method but draws attention to its potential problems. Examples of peer health education are reviewed and the issues surrounding them discussed. These include: theoretical background, rationales, cultural constraints, ethical and operational issues, and the challenges for monitoring and evaluation. The paper concludes by suggesting that practitioners and evaluators must reflect on the difficulties inherent in artificially reconstructing a social process.

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Attitude survey and interview data are mobilised to address neglect of men's contribution to low fertility and wider social change in families and relationships. Men's attitudes are as relevant as women's to understanding fertility behaviour. However, fertility behaviour can only be understood in the context of a package of changes in gender relations and family life. Data from a random sample of men aged 18-49 surveyed in the Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) survey 2005/06 are combined with in-depth interviews conducted in 2007 with 75 men aged 25-44 identified through the Scottish Household Survey as not living in co-resident partnership arrangements. Both datasets encompass the age span conventionally associated with having children and men who were the potential partners of women delaying a first child until their 30s. They allow consideration of the impact of social contact with parents and children on men's fertility intentions and how the role of provider features in men's views about parenting. The interviews focus on men who have fallen out of, or have not entered, co-resident partnerships and examine the relationship between partnering and parenting. In combination the data suggest how men act as a complementary or contradictory downward drag on women's fertility and that their role has been underestimated in understanding the package of family change of which low fertility is a part.s ore_1924 463..485

This paper in the research methods series critically assesses the use of combined methods in health promotion research. A selection of pos sibilities for combining methods is described and examples given. The paper invites reflection on the assumption that a combination of quantita tive and qualitative methods will inevitably produce the most reliable and valid research results. A more critical approach in health promotion research is suggested based on consideration of issues of epistemology, methodology and practical application. The paper advocates that research reports address and analyse the contradictions as well as the compatibilities involved in the production of data using combined methods approaches.