Frequently Asked Questions - Program

All proposals must fall into one of three of the second-round priority research areas: 

The purpose of the PHLR program is to encourage more rigorous empirical research in public health law. That requires building up a field that is based on publication and scholarly interchange and additional mechanisms in scholarly interchange. At the same time, the evidence has to have a policy impact; therefore the law review article, the social science journal article or the medical journal article cannot be the end product. The results of the proposal must be tailored to different audiences that can use the findings in important ways. The project would need to be addressing something new; such as a new advance or a new application of the material to rigorous scientific research. Also, if it is purely doctrinal analysis, there is a heavy burden to show that it is illuminating in some important way how public health is affected by law. The applicant should tie the legal analysis to the analysis of the data and a logic model to highlight where the presence or absence of law, at least in terms of the existing knowledge, could be an important factor in public health.

The focus of this CFP is on public health law research. For a proposal to be competitive during the brief proposal period, the methodology has to be rigorous and well defined with as much detail as is possible in the space allotted.

The PHLR program uses "public health" in a broad sense. For example, consider the use of laws designed to influence a particular health outcome like seatbelt laws and questions of the effect of tax law on the income inequality and its effect on the epidemiology of disease. These topics are all appropriate for consideration in this program provided the work is based on solid methods that will produce important results.

No, it would not be inappropriate. In fact, it is the hope of PHLR that collaborations occur among people who usually do not work together, such as a lawyer at a research institution working with public health leaders or academics. Having real practice questions addressed by practitioners would be a great use of collaboration.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selects national advisory committees to advise our large national programs. The NAC members for PHLR can be found at our program website at www.publichealthlawresearch.org

No, although existing data can certainly speed up the process, it is not part of the program's selection criteria.

This question needs to be examined individually for each proposal. The work has to be a novel examination of how law has had an effect on population health. However, for each study, PHLR also wants to see that the correct methodology for data collection and data analysis are applied.

The PHLR program is taking a broad view of law, and is interested equally in law on the books and in the activities of agencies that enforce law. Studies of how laws are implemented, including the ways that statutes are turned into agency policies, certainly fall within the scope of the program. PHLR has discussed all of these topics within the CFP, and the key element is not so much how the applicant defines policy in the abstract but whether a particular study tells us something concrete about the influence of law in public health.

Specific questions should be directed to the Public Health Law Research helpdesk at PublicHealthLawResearch@sra.com. Questions will be routed to the appropriate person, and an individual response will be given. By going through the helpdesk PHLR is able to capture the types of questions applicants are asking, and post them into the Frequently Asked Questions section of the Web site;