Theory, Practice and Evidence

What is Theory, Practice and Evidence?

The Public Health Law Research Program “Theory, Practice and Evidence” series is a collection of commissioned papers on the state of knowledge about the effects of important public health laws. The papers in this series assess the available evidence about the impact of public health laws, addressing the questions: What do we know? What don’t we know? What further research is needed in order to understand the effects these laws have on health? The authors, leading scholars in public health and law, critically review the literature, evaluating the strength of the evidence base by commenting on the rigor of studies conducted to date.


  • Mental Illness, Law, and a Public Health Law Research Agenda

    John Petrila J.D.,LL.M., from the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute in the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the University of South Florida, and Jeffrey Swanson, Duke University School of Medicine and PHLR Methods Core member, assess the state of knowledge about the role of mental health law in public health, and the impact of public health laws on mental...

  • The Potential for State Attorneys General to Promote the Public’s Health

    Stephen Teret and Lainie Rutkow from the Center for Law and the Public's Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health explain the significant authority and capacity of Attorneys General to promote the public’s health. 

  • Intellectual Property Innovations and the Pharmaceutical Industry

    Aaron Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital discusses the effects on medical innovation of statutes that provide additional intellectual property rights or related incentives to pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology developers in the U.S.  

  • The Impact of TBI- and Concussion-Related Laws

    This study focuses on the myriad of state-level public-health law responses to the rise in traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in organized youth sports. It contextually frames the public health law interventions that states have implemented, and systematically and empirically analyzes state-level legal frameworks intended to address TBIs.

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.