ArticleEpidemiologic reviews2022
The Revolution Will Be Hard to Evaluate: How Co-Occurring Policy Changes Affect Research on the Health Effects of Social Policies.
Article in Epidemiologic reviews, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Punitive legal responses to prenatal drug use in the United States: A survey of state policies and systematic review of their public health impacts.The International journal on drug policy · 2024Pooled it
- State Policy Liberalism in Adolescence and Risk for Dementia from 2000 to 2016 among Older U.S. Adults.Journal of health and social behavior · 2026Article
- Association of pandemic-era US county-level policies with adult health and health behaviors.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- US State Policy Index for Population Health Analyses.The Milbank quarterly · 2026Article
- Causal Inference in Health Disparities Research.Annual review of public health · 2026Review
- Exploring Links between Brain Image-Derived Phenotypes and Accelerometer-Measured Physical Activity in the UK Biobank.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Challenges in estimating effects of hypothetical interventions on resources patterned by structural racism: an example in a rural North Carolina Medicaid population.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Enacting Domestic Worker Bills of Rights: A Quasi-experimental Analysis of Impacts on Domestic Workers' Working Hours and Earnings.New solutions : a journal of environmental and occupational health policy : NS · 2026Article
- State minimum wage laws and state-level rates of new HIV diagnoses among Black, Latine, and White US women and men, 2010-2019.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2026Article
- The impact of state safety-net policies on perinatal birth outcomes by maternal race.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2026Article
- Parental socioeconomic composition of birth cohorts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prenatal drug use criminalization and health system avoidance: Evidence from births in Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, 1989-2019.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Characterizing state-level structural cisheterosexism trajectories using sequence and cluster analysis, 1996-2016, 50 US states and Washington, DC, and associations with health status and health care outcomes.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Easing Cash Assistance Rules and Breastfeeding.JAMA health forum · 2025Article
- The long-term health effects of welfare reform.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- How do restrictions on opioid prescribing, harm reduction, and treatment coverage policies relate to opioid overdose deaths in the United States in 2013-2020? An application of a new state opioid policy scale.The International journal on drug policy · 2025Article
- The association of state policies and opioid analgesic amount dispensed from retail pharmacies.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- Methods Used to Evaluate the Health Effects of Social Policies: A Systematic Review.Current epidemiology reports · 2025Article
- A Longitudinal Multivariable Analysis: State Policies and Opioid Dispensing in Medicare Beneficiaries Undergoing Surgery.Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Article
- Target Trial Emulation for Evaluating Health Policy.Annals of internal medicine · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Extensive empirical health research leverages variation in the timing and location of policy changes as quasi-experiments. Multiple social policies may be adopted simultaneously in the same locations, creating co-occurrence that must be addressed analytically for valid inferences. The pervasiveness and consequences of co-occurring policies have received limited attention. We analyzed a systematic sample of 13 social policy databases covering diverse domains including poverty, paid family leave, and tobacco use. We quantified policy co-occurrence in each database as the fraction of variation in each policy measure across different jurisdictions and times that could be explained by covariation with other policies. We used simulations to estimate the ratio of the variance of effect estimates under the observed policy co-occurrence to variance if policies were independent. Policy co-occurrence ranged from very high for state-level cannabis policies to low for country-level sexual minority-rights policies. For 65% of policies, greater than 90% of the place-time variation was explained by other policies. Policy co-occurrence increased the variance of effect estimates by a median of 57-fold. Co-occurring policies are common and pose a major methodological challenge to rigorously evaluating health effects of individual social policies. When uncontrolled, co-occurring policies confound one another, and when controlled, resulting positivity violations may substantially inflate the variance of estimated effects. Tools to enhance validity and precision for evaluating co-occurring policies are needed.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.