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?
This study will enumerate the costs, implementation barriers, facilitators, and the administrative and financial burden that joint-use agreements (JUAs) may impose on schools that in turn can impact children's access to recreational activity. Understanding the consequences and main drivers of...
The study will examine the relationship between state laws that preempt local tobacco control policies (i.e. local regulation of smoking in workplaces and public places, youth access to tobacco products, and tobacco advertising) and population health behaviors and outcomes (i.e. adult and youth...
This study will measure whether quantity restrictions, electronic tracking, or a doctor’s prescription requirement for purchases of pseudoephedrine reduce the public health costs of methamphetamine production and use. The project is significant because it is the only one to measure the national...
This study will estimate the financial costs and potential health and public safety benefits of the implementation of a NYC food safety restaurant grading initiative. The City Council's action in establishing this policy has sparked substantial controversy and public scrutiny, with restaurant...
This study will assess whether the Michigan Department of Community Health’s policy requiring parental consent for research use of residual newborn screening dried blood samples (DBS) leads to the maintenance of a robust sample collection that supports population health-based research. This...
This study will study the implementation and outcomes of a court-originating remedial action to offer less restrictive housing to mentally ill adult home residents in New York. Residents, conditioned by what the court termed “learned helplessness” endemic to institutions will need the support of...
This study will identify effective legal strategies for improving implementation and enforcement of distracted driving legislation to reduce fatal and non-fatal automobile crashes. Up to 28% of crash risk is attributable to distraction from mobile devices, and there are more mobile phones than...
This study investigates how a Breastfeeding (BF) Mothers Bill of Rights and a law requiring public reporting of hospital-specific BF rates affect changes in hospital BF policies and maternity care practices in New York. Through semi-structured interviews, qualitative analysis, and...
This project will assess how a new law in the state of Washington (Voter Initiative 1183, on 6/1/12) which abolishes state alcohol “control” is associated with changes in (1) alcohol availability, enforcement, price and advertising; (2) predictors of alcohol consumption such as perceived...
This project will explore how policies that govern public employees' participation in the policy process affect state health departments' effectiveness in advocating for sound public health laws and policies. By understanding how agencies and their employees participate in law and policy...
The application of criminal penalties for unintentional transmission of or exposure to HIV - "HIV criminalization" -- continues to be an important topic in HIV policy, drawing attention from researchers and policy-makers alike. The President's 2010 National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United...
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of teen death and injury. The CHOP team will evaluate a New Jersey Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) law (Kyleigh's Law passed 5/1/10), which requires probationary teen drivers to display a decal on the vehicle's license plate, making them easily...
In 2011, governors and conservative legislatures in 4 of 11 states with state-run monopoly spirits sales pushed to shift to private sales at many more outlets, while GA voted on allowing off-premises alcohol sales on Sundays. The study aims: (1) to develop and apply a simulation model that...
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 (...
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.
© RWJF 2013
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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.