Resisting Public Health Law Interventions: Socio-Demographic Variance, Message, and Messenger as Mitigating Forces

From mandatory seat-belts to prohibiting texting while driving, from menu calorie counts to counting youth concussions, the public’s health has been transformed by legal regimes that attempt to both regulate individual behavior and teach optimal public health strategies.

More recently, public health advocates have utilized state law to educate parents, youth, coaches and others about the dangers of concussions in youth sports.  But public support for these recent interventions may differ from the support for previous public-health law interventions. 

This study utilizes a nationwide survey of thousands of parents and a prior legal mapping study to evaluate cultural and socio-demographic reasons for why citizens resist these more recent public health interventions more than others.  Further attention is paid to race and gender differences in public perception of public-health law interventions and the role that race and gender might play in the transmission of legal norms and the adoption of such norms in affected populations.   To further explore the intersection of race and gender in the transmission and adoption of new public health law and norms, various experiments were conducted to vary the racial tones of the health message and the reasoning utilized for the intervention.

 The article concludes by suggesting that as public health law further moves into regulating behavior to achieve optimal public health goals, segments of the population may prove increasingly resistant to such messages – depending on the race and gender of the recipient as well as the race, gender, and content of the message and messenger.