Collaborative Research: Patterns, Context, and Secondary Impacts of State Policy Responses to the Pandemic

合作研究：国家应对疫情政策的模式、背景和次要影响

• 批准号: 2148215
• 负责人: Bruce Desmarais
• 金额: $ 36.62万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-07-01 至 2025-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2148215&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Patterns; Context; Secondary

Understanding the role of policy developments in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is vital for researchers, lawmakers, and the public to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies. This opportunity to learn from an ongoing pandemic and inform choices in the future requires extensive and timely data gathering. U.S. state governments have taken tens of thousands of public policy actions—executive orders, regulations, and laws in response to COVID-19. This project advances our understanding of the causes and consequences of states' policy responses to the pandemic. The PIs collect data on state governments' decisions to mitigate COVID-19's impact, analyze the adoption and diffusion of pandemic-related policies, track state officials' online discussion of the pandemic, and study health impacts of policies implemented in response to it. This project provides insights into how states manage a global health crisis, the ways that online communication and policy debate involving public officials factor into the contemporary management of a public health emergency, and the public health impacts of rapid innovations in state health policies. It provides comprehensive data sources on state policy activities as well as online communication by state officials. These data are helpful to others who seek to understand the causes and consequences of states' pandemic policies. The project also involves hiring and training a diverse, multidisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate research assistants as well as a post-doc. The project leaders will provide extensive training, experience, and mentorship to these early career researchers.State policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have occurred rapidly, with information and choices updated daily. This timeframe provides an opportunity to study the rapid spread of policy responses—two orders of magnitude more frequent than the typical yearly timescale covered in policy diffusion research. The data collected in this study cover hundreds of pandemic-related policies and tens of thousands of policy actions by states, all unfolding over a three-year time period. The decision environment in which governments select their responses to COVID-19 involves several key components that have been found to be important in the study of the spread of public policy: information, imitation, competition, and coercion. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a rare opportunity to study the spread of public policy with voluminous contemporary information about the factors that influence states' decisions. Specifically, this project uses the recent timeline and high salience of COVID-19 policy to understand the relationship between online communication involving policymakers and official policymaking activity. Because most elected state officials are active online, particularly on Twitter, policy responses to COVID-19 present the opportunity to understand the relationship between online communication by officials and public policymaking. Lastly, to illustrate the utility of the data collected, this project uses a difference-in-differences approach to study the COVID-19 policies’ secondary impacts on health. Given that COVID-19 policy responses have affected every facet of public and private life, this project includes a focused study of the impacts of pandemic policy responses on maternal and infant health in the American states.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

了解政策发展在应对新冠肺炎大流行中的作用，对于研究人员、立法者和公众提高对未来突发公共卫生事件的准备至关重要。有机会从正在发生的大流行中吸取教训，并为今后的选择提供信息，需要广泛和及时地收集数据。美国各州政府已经采取了数以万计的公共政策行动--行政命令、法规和法律来回应新冠肺炎。这一项目促进了我们对各国应对大流行政策的原因和后果的理解。这些私人投资机构收集州政府缓解新冠肺炎影响的决策的数据，分析大流行相关政策的采纳和传播，跟踪州官员对大流行的在线讨论，并研究应对政策的健康影响。该项目提供了对国家如何管理全球健康危机、公共官员参与的在线交流和政策辩论在当代公共卫生突发事件管理中的作用以及国家卫生政策快速创新对公共健康的影响等方面的见解。它提供关于国家政策活动的全面数据来源以及国家官员的在线交流。这些数据对其他寻求了解各州流行病政策的原因和后果的人很有帮助。该项目还包括雇用和培训一支由研究生和本科生研究助理以及博士后组成的多元化、多学科团队。项目负责人将为这些早期职业研究人员提供广泛的培训、经验和指导。国家对新冠肺炎疫情的政策反应迅速，信息和选择每天更新。这一时间框架为研究政策反应的快速传播提供了机会--比政策扩散研究涵盖的典型年度时间尺度的频率高出两个数量级。这项研究收集的数据涵盖了数百项与大流行有关的政策和各州的数万项政策行动，所有这些都是在三年的时间内展开的。政府选择对新冠肺炎的回应的决策环境涉及几个已被发现在公共政策传播研究中非常重要的关键组成部分：信息、模仿、竞争和胁迫。因此，利用有关影响各国决策因素的大量当代信息，新冠肺炎疫情为研究公共政策传播提供了难得的机会。具体地说，该项目利用最近的时间轴和新冠肺炎政策的高度显着性，来理解政策制定者参与的在线交流与官方决策活动之间的关系。由于大多数当选的州官员在网上都很活跃，尤其是在推特上，对新冠肺炎的政策回应提供了一个机会，让我们了解官员们的在线沟通与公共政策制定之间的关系。最后，为了说明收集到的数据的实用性，本项目使用差异分析方法研究了新冠肺炎政策对健康的二次影响。鉴于应对新冠肺炎的政策已经影响到公共和私人生活的方方面面，该项目包括一项关于流行病应对政策对美国各州母婴健康影响的重点研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。