Grantee Research
Funded by competitive grants from Public Health Law Research, each independent “Grantee Research” project seeks to build the evidence for and strengthen the use of regulatory, legal and policy solutions to improve public health. PHLR is also interested in identifying and ameliorating laws and legal practices that unintentionally harm health. As public health practitioners, policy-makers and others consider how laws influence the public’s health, they need evidence to inform questions such as: How does law influence health and health behavior? Which laws have the greatest impact? Can current laws be made more effective through better enforcement, or do they require amendment?
Public health experts, legal scholars and policy makers are increasingly recognizing that laws can keep people safe and healthy; for example, by encouraging the use of seat belts and by keeping the environment safe from toxins. This growing recognition has led to the emergence of “public health...
This project explores the nexus between criminal justice and public health. Criminal justice professionals are increasingly concerned with developing ‘evidence-based’ policy, and making sure that their efforts are targeted and effective. This is the case with the Philadelphia Police Department,...
Mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders constitute a global public health problem of enormous proportions. Developing and implementing cost-effective interventions to improve the lives of people with mental illnesses and comorbid substance abuse disorders remains a challenge for multiple...
This project considers children who are overweight, the most common health problem facing American childeren. States, and to a lesser extent, local governments, have passed a variety of laws aimed at reducing youths’ exposure to high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and encouraging...
This project will look at the implementation of Virginia’s newly-enacted Health Care Decisions Act (HCDA) and identify the key barriers and enabling factors that will determine the law’s ultimate impact on health outcomes, safety, and quality of life for persons with severe mental illness. The...
The rapid growth of the immigrant Latino population in North Carolina and nationwide has led to immigration policies that may have a potentially profound impact on utilization of public health services. This study will evaluate whether a relationship exists between local immigration law...
The American Nonsmokers' Rights (ANR) Foundation will collect and code local tobacco control laws nationwide related to youth access to tobacco products, tobacco advertising, and conditional use permits. The final dataset is expected to include as many as 70 variables for the youth access laws (...
Americans saw more than 2.8 million foreclosures recent years, and the impacts on public health are largely unknown. The foreclosure process may impact health if it causes stress-related illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes, if it forces reallocation of household funds that are otherwise...
Stakeholders in sports medicine have focused on decreasing the risk of repeated concussions among athletes. This study will use a random sample of high schools in Washington to determine the effect of the type of implementation of concussion-related laws on the risk of playing with concussive...
Unintentional fatalities because of prescription medications are an increasing problem in Utah and the United States. In response to this crisis of drug-related harm, the state government of Utah has undertaken several regulatory changes including promulgating guidelines for opioid prescribing...
This study aims to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of state laws restricting use of electronic devices while driving in reducing fatalities on public roads and examine the interrelationship between distracted driving, alcohol consumption and state law.
Proactive policing has become a primary strategy for controlling violence and disorder in urban America. The key tactic is the widespread use of "Terry" stops, where police temporarily detain, frisk and perhaps search persons or their property when an officer has "reasonable suspicion" to...
Prescription drug overdose deaths, mostly from opioid pain relievers, now outpace motor vehicle fatalities in most states. In about 35 states, electronic databases known as prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) are intended to reduce abuse of prescription drugs and overdose by tracking...
Public health law research usually focuses on the substantive laws that effect health, not the accompanying funding laws. This study addresses a question that permeates public health law research: Does the source and/or type of funding, not just the amount of funding, impact health outcomes? Of...
The United States suffers from an epidemic of health care associated infections (HAIs) accounting for 1.7 million annual infections and 100,000 deaths. Many HAIs are preventable, but hospitals have limited incentives to prevent them. More than 20 states now have laws requiring hospitals to...
Hierarchy of Evidence
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Hierarchy of Evidence
The Public Health Law Research program is dedicated to building the evidence base for public health law. In pursuing this aim, we fund and conduct a diverse array of research activities ranging from formative efforts that identify important research questions to the generation of legal data sets to experiments employing various methodological designs. As a service to policy-makers and other consumers of NPO research, we have organized our resources according to this hierarchy of evidence, which depicts levels of the scientific authority. In general, resources higher up the pyramid are less susceptible to bias and therefore provide more robust evidence about the effects of public health laws. Experimental designs, for example, utilize randomization and double-blinding to reduce selection and measurement biases making them more powerful tools for understanding causal relationships than quasi-experimental and observational designs. At the top of our pyramid are studies that use systematic processes such as meta-analysis to assess a question in light of a body of primary studies that have examined it. At the bottom of our pyramid are foundational resources like legal datasets and papers setting out research agendas. The bulk of our resources are primary studies in the middle two levels. While this hierarchy reflects judgments about the authority of various designs, it does not suggest that research employing a design from a higher level is always more scientifically authoritative than research conducted in a design from a lower level.
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Public Health Law Research is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It is housed at the Temple University Beasley School of Law.