The overarching goal of public health is to maximise the health of the population, and to achieve this we need evidence about what works and what does not work. Good studies are difficult to design and implement, and interpretation of their results and conclusions is not always as straightforward as we might hope. How, then, can we make the best use of this information? In the next three chapters we look at ways to identify, appraise, integrate and interpret the literature to generate the evidence we need to inform policy and practice. In this chapter we focus on interpreting the results from a single study, because if they are not valid they will be of limited value. The central question we have to answer when we read a study report is, ‘Are the results of the study valid?’

This chapter discusses the four main reasons to measure outcomes: 1. measuring the change in outcomes tells you how you are doing with respect to providing health care; 2. with outcome data you can identify opportunities for learning and improvement; 3. outcome data give patients and their families critical information about what to expect when they seek care from you or your organization (or, if you work for a payer organization or employer, from the health care providers within your network); and 4. you have an ethical obligation to understand whether the care you provide is helping or harming.

Ndebele–Shona ethnic animosities came to the fore before, during and after the June and July 1985 general elections. Violence shifted from wartime residual to ethnic-based violence. The Zimbabwe government was heavily influenced by strong ethnic identities and the military. Ethnic polarisation problems stood out as the major challenge to nation building in Zimbabwe. Ethnic differences were key drivers of election violence in 1985. The 1985 elections took place against a backdrop of bitter and mutual mistrust between Zanu PF and PF Zapu, personified by Mugabe and Nkomo, and their Shona- and Ndebele-based political support, respectively. The problem of dissidents in parts of Matabeleland and the Midlands, as well as Fifth Brigade reprisals not only against the bandits but also civilians in these regions, openly played out ethnic hostilities between these two main political rivalries. Zanu PF ran the country under a state of emergency justified on the three grounds of containing the dissident problem, dealing with Mozambican Renamo bandits from the eastern border and the destabilisation attacks by the then apartheid South African military. There was no genuine or concerted effort to heal the wounds of war by all sides despite a rhetorical reconciliation policy.

This chapter emphasizes the fact that an author starts drafting a paper by compiling the results, the experimental findings (data) that have the evidence to support (or refute) the hypothesis under test. It emphasizes the need for selection to be fair considering positive, negative and neutral data, the order and logic in dealing with the sequence of presentation of the data, and how every experiment needs tight controls. Statistical issues are discussed.

This chapter lays the foundation for what comes next by providing a summary discussion of the electoral history of each country. Intended partly to introduce names, events, dates and institutions that will be reappear in subsequent chapters, it also sets out a central element of our argument: that the history of elections has been shaped by a chronic tension between two alternative registers of virtue: a patrimonial register that revolves around reciprocity and personal relations; and a civic register that exalts bureaucratic order and emphasises the moral claims of national citizenship. The electoral histories shaped by that tension in the three countries may seem to follow different trajectories, yet they share significant features. In all three, electoral politics has continued to revolve around securing access to the resources controlled by ‘the government’; in all three, the same chronic tension persists – between elections as manifestations of civic order, and as sites for an intense local politics of clientelism and redistribution. Finally, all three continue to see high levels of electoral participation that shape political subjectivity. Widely understood as a site for moral claims-making as well as political competition, elections underwrite – albeit in a contingent way - the legitimacy of the state.

Results are the most tangible and readily measurable of the horizontal dimensions of performance. Hence, we shall begin our discussion at the end, by examining those approaches to performance management that are results-focused. This includes individual results as well as those associated with group and organisation-wide results. The chapter begins with an overview of those facets of work performance that are commonly characterised as ‘results’. Next we consider some of the key concepts associated with defining and measuring results, the promise and perils of results measurement, and the requirements for measurement reliability. The remainder of the chapter is then devoted to a discussion of two of the most widely applied results-based performance measurement and management methods, namely goal-setting and the balanced scorecard.

A research project is not finished until we have written it up. Scientific reports have a standard format, with some variation. This should be familiar from your reading. This chapter builds on the general advice for writing in Chapter 14 and focusses on how to write a scientific report. I provide general guidance for writing your report, then cover each section of the manuscript in turn. I focus on primary research articles, because these are the main way in which we disseminate new research. Much of the advice applies more generally to theses and dissertations. Most reports have multiple authors and we must negotiate authorship fairly.