The Network for Health and Welfare Studies

 Dear Friends,

We are happy to have brought to you a new face of our website as we enter yet another new phase of the development of the Network.

We have a fruitful year in 2008 with our colleagues received RGC and a number of large-scale grants from the PolyU Block Grants. These grants will enable us to consolidate a good number of investigator-led research projects in the past decade to form a few theme-based research areas including community health promotion, intergenerational poverty, positive development & learning and social neuroscience. Apart from the fact that these grants will facilitate the building of data source from locales in Hong Kong and Beijing, a number of data platforms will be created to allow regular and longer-term sharing of findings and knowledge development in these thematic areas of government policy priorities.

Central to this new phase of our research activities are the continual focus on innovations in the design, data capturing approaches, and analytical models we have refined over the years. Taking an ecological perspective of all our subject matters, we have now made it a routine to use multilevel design, create relational measures, deploy person-oriented analyses and aim to study institutional or system change initiatives. This level of freedom in the selection and execution of research activities does not come without sacrifices, often in terms of additional time commitments to address certain paradigmatic challenges on the part of our researchers. In some cases, we have to forego reaping early fruition that was expedient. In this connection, I would like to thank all our research staff whose persistence in the course of our work defines for us the many qualities we as individuals treasure.

To end, I wish to quote from Galileo Galilei (1610) on measurement.
“We must measure what can be measured, and make measureable what cannot be measured.”

Charles C. Chan, PhD.
Director, Network for Health and Welfare Studies
 

非常高興能夠為大家帶來一個全新的網站介面，在這裡，我總結了「網絡」在過去一年工作的成果及介紹未來的發展。

過去一年(2008)，憑著同事們的努力，我們的工作得到豐富的成果。首先，我們獲得大學研究資助局的科研撥款，以及理工大學的大型研究資助撥款。這些資助使我們得以總結多項過去十年的研究成果，並發展出四個重點研究主題：包括社區健康促進，跨代貧窮研究，正面發展與學習，和社會腦神經科學。這些研究撥款不但有助我們在香港及北京建立收集數據的來源，亦將促成多個數據平台的建立，令大家可定期及長期地分享多項政府政策所關注的研究成果和知識。

進入新的階段，我們會繼續將研究項目的重點放在創新設計，數據收集方法，及模型分析方面，使我們的研究成果變得更完善。一直以來，我們都以生態學的角度作研究出發點，現在，我們更利用常規式的多層次設計，關係性量度的建立，和以人為本的分析方法，集中研究組織或系統變革的主導因素。為了達致這個層次的自由度，我們在選擇和執行研究項目時需要作出一定程度的犧牲，這包括研究人員需要付出額外的時間，去挑戰某些傳統模式。在某些情況下，我們甚至不得不放棄一些早期的研究成果。故此，我要感謝「網絡」的全体研究人員，在過程中努力不懈，堅持做到最好，我們團隊的每一份子均為這些素質感到自豪。

最後，我想引用伽利略 (1610)關於量度所說﹕
「可以被量度的，我們必須量度﹔不可被量度的，我們要使它可以被量度」

陳清海博士
醫療及社福研究網絡總監