Influence of Personal Responsibility Rhetoric on Public Health Outcomes in Judici

描述（由申请人提供）：调查人员建议调查烟草、快餐和加糖饮料行业在制定许多积极和消极的公共卫生政策的法律和监管论坛上使用个人责任修辞的情况。作为对法律背景的回应，烟草业援引个人责任的修辞，将注意力从其行为转移到个人身上，以应对伤害。当将个人责任概念用作立法和监管监督的基础、在司法程序中或在其他法律和政策形成论坛中使用时，个人责任概念在修辞上被利用来模糊或转移对公众健康产生不利影响的更大的结构性决定因素————包括有罪行为者————的注意力。调查人员将查明促进烟草业使用个人责任修辞的司法、监管、立法操作程序和相关媒体报道，以及抵制这种修辞、支持分析健康行为的结构性决定因素的程序。烟草业的个人责任言论也可能成为其他商业利益集团面临承认其产品正在损害公众健康的榜样。调查人员将研究快餐和加糖饮料行业在司法、监管、立法论坛和相关媒体上就其在肥胖流行中所扮演的角色所发表的言论，并将其与烟草业的言论进行比较。研究将围绕九个关键的法律和政策事件展开，这些事件将作为调查人员的理论样本。其理论是，使用个人责任的修辞可以避免司法、监管和立法论坛的审查，这些论坛是由商业设计的健康行为决定因素。除了传统的法律和政策研究外，调查人员还依靠人种学内容分析来检查包含烟草内部行业文件、相关法律论坛生成的法律文件、新闻媒体报道、行业公共关系文件以及烟草、快餐和加糖饮料行业行为的其他文件的数据集。研究人员将根据初步文献综述和对已确定数据集中文本样本的检查，制定一个初始编码方案。调查人员将对来自已识别数据集的样本进行编码测试。研究结果将在同行评审出版物上发表的文章中加以描述，并通过参与学术论坛积极传播。公共卫生相关性：通过了解烟草业在法院和立法机构等法律和监管论坛上对个人责任概念的修辞使用，并分析这种修辞如何出现在新闻、舆论和公共关系媒体材料中，将有可能更有效地预测和反击这种修辞，并在法律和监管论坛上制定基于证据的公共卫生干预措施。将对使用这种修辞的分析扩展到与肥胖流行有关的“快餐”和加糖饮料行业，并将这些方法与烟草业的方法进行比较，将使决策者更好地准备采取重要的政策干预措施，以减少肥胖及其不断升级的公共卫生影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The investigators propose to examine the tobacco, fast food and sweetened beverage industries' use of personal responsibility rhetoric in legal and regulatory forums where many public health policies, both positive and negative, are created. As a response to legal context, the tobacco industry invokes personal responsibility rhetoric to focus attention away from its conduct and toward the individual in responding to the harm. When used as the basis of legislative and regulatory oversight, in judicial proceedings, or in other forums of law and policy formation, the concept of personal responsibility exploited rhetorically to obscure or shift attention from larger structural determinants -- including culpable actors -- that adversely affect the public's health. The investigators will identify the judicial, regulatory, legislative operational processes and related media coverage that have facilitated the use of personal responsibility rhetoric by the tobacco industry and those processes that have resisted such rhetoric in favor of analyses of structural determinants of health behaviors. The tobacco industry's personal responsibility rhetoric may also serve as a model for other commercial interests faced with the recognition that their products are harming the public's health. The investigators will examine rhetoric in the judicial, regulatory, legislative forums and related media by the fast food and sweetened beverage industries in their identified role in the obesity epidemic and compare their rhetoric with that deployed by the tobacco industry. Research will be oriented around nine key law and policy events, which will function as the investigators' theoretical samples. The theory is that the use of personal responsibility rhetoric shields from scrutiny in the judicial, regulatory and legislative forums commercially engineered determinants of health behavior. In addition to traditional law and policy research, the investigators rely on ethnographic content analysis to examine datasets containing internal industry tobacco documents, legal documents generated in the relevant legal forums, news media coverage, industry public relations documents and other documentation of conduct by the tobacco, fast food and sweetened beverage industries. The investigators will develop an initial coding scheme based on a preliminary literature reviews and examination of samples of text in the identified datasets. The investigators will test the coding on samples from the identified datasets. The study findings will be described in articles to be published in peer-reviewed publications and actively disseminated through participation in scholarly forums. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: By understanding the tobacco industry's rhetorical use of the concept of personal responsibility in legal and regulatory forums such as courts and legislatures where much health policy is determined, and analyzing how this rhetoric appears in news, opinion and public relations media material, it will be possible to more effectively anticipate and counter such rhetoric and enact evidence-based public health interventions in legal and regulatory forums. Extending the analysis of the use of such rhetoric to the "fast food" and sweetened beverage industries that are implicated in the obesity epidemic and comparing these approaches to that of the tobacco industry will better prepare policy-makers for undertaking important policy interventions to reduce obesity and its escalating public health impact.