Is the public health expert report structured?

Une étude exploratoire par analyse de contenant d’un corpus de rapports d’experts et entretiens auprès du Centre d’Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique des Armées

Abstract

The scientific article has a structure with strict and standardized rules. On the other hand, there are no standards or rules which structure the expert report. The hypothesis of this work is that this structure, in public health, is directly inspired by the article. To prove this hypothesis, we adopted a two-step qualitative methodology. The first investigation analyzed a corpus of four reports from leading public health organizations. The second consisted of a survey at CESPA (Center for Epidemiology and Public Health of Army) through interviews with five experts, and exploratory analysis of the corpus of about fifteen of their reports. Our results have highlighted a structuring of the expert report which is close to the IMRAD (Introduction / Material and Methods / Results / And / Discussion) and ILPIA (Introduction / Literature / Problem / Implication / Future) structures of the scientific article, thus confirming our hypothesis.