Overview
Public Health Law Research: Theory and Method defines core theories and research methods for the field of public health law research.\xa0Public health law has re-emerged as an important field of legal scholarship and professional work in public health. Research that can identify healthy and unhealthy laws and legal practices has not kept pace with the growth of the field, however, making this book both important and timely. Public Health Law Research is the first book to explain methods for measuring and studying law as a central means for advancing public health, and is edited by the two foremost public health law researchers in country. The book will have five parts. Foundations frames the content of the book, and the specific field of public health law research we are building in the broader conceptual area. Theory is central to the design of any scientific study, and is the subject of the second section.\xa0 The third section of the book is on collecting the requisite data, with all three chapters of this section very targeted to the particular complexities in collecting data for empirical studies of law. The fourth section of the book addresses research design issues directly applicable to public health law evaluations. The fifith and final section of the book discusses the challenge of translating the results of scientific evaluations into widely diffused and implemented public health laws and the importance of this nascent but growing field.
