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

了解政策发展在应对COVID-19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。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，就需要广泛和及时地收集数据。美国各州政府采取了数以万计的公共政策行动，包括行政命令、法规和法律，以应对COVID-19。这一项目促进了我们对各国应对这一流行病政策的原因和后果的理解。这些项目收集州政府减轻COVID-19影响的决策数据，分析大流行相关政策的采用和传播，跟踪州政府官员对大流行的在线讨论，并研究为应对疫情而实施的政策对健康的影响。该项目提供了对国家如何管理全球卫生危机的见解，涉及公共官员的在线沟通和政策辩论的方式纳入公共卫生紧急情况的当代管理，以及国家卫生政策快速创新对公共卫生的影响。它提供有关国家政策活动以及国家官员在线交流的全面数据来源。这些数据对其他试图了解国家流行病政策的原因和后果的人很有帮助。该项目还包括招聘和培训一个多元化的多学科团队，包括研究生和本科生的研究助理以及博士后。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。针对COVID-19大流行的国家政策反应迅速，信息和选择每天都在更新。这个时间框架为研究政策反应的快速传播提供了一个机会——比政策扩散研究中典型的年度时间尺度要频繁两个数量级。本研究收集的数据涵盖了数百项与大流行相关的政策和各国采取的数万项政策行动，这些政策都是在三年的时间内展开的。政府选择应对COVID-19的决策环境涉及研究公共政策传播的几个重要组成部分：信息、模仿、竞争和胁迫。因此，2019冠状病毒病大流行为研究公共政策的传播提供了难得的机会，可以利用有关影响国家决策因素的大量当代信息。具体而言，本项目利用最近的时间线和COVID-19政策的高度突出性来理解政策制定者在线交流与官方政策制定活动之间的关系。由于大多数当选的州官员都在网上活跃，特别是在Twitter上，因此对COVID-19的政策反应为了解官员在线沟通与公共政策制定之间的关系提供了机会。最后，为了说明所收集数据的效用，本项目采用差异中的差异方法来研究COVID-19政策对健康的二次影响。鉴于应对COVID-19的政策影响到公共和私人生活的方方面面，本项目包括对大流行政策应对对美国各州孕产妇和婴儿健康的影响进行重点研究。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知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.