- Although I hesitate to quote myself, Ken Allison and I offered this definition of scientific rigor in a paper which we published in Health Promotion International (Allison and Rootman, 1996)

- To us, scientific rigor refers to the process of systematically studying a phenomenon, using an appropriate design and methods for the problem that is being examined, and often including the development and testing of theory

- We suggested that it was more than this, however, involving an attitude of curiosity about the way the world works, with attendant risks of having one's hypothesis proven incorrect

- We also suggested a number of reasons why health promotion research needs to be scientifically rigorous, one of which was the fact that health promotion approaches are often perceived as based largely on rhetoric and enthusiasm, rather than empirical evidence

- We further noted some of the components of scientific rigor in health promotion research.