Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

December 9, 2020

Strengthening Policy Coding Methodologies to Improve COVID-19 Disease Modeling and Policy Responses: A Proposed Coding Framework and Recommendations

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To address inconsistencies in how policies related to closing and reopening elements of society are described and analyzed, researchers developed a framework to categorize the various policies in place in 12 US states. A comparative content analysis using a 16-element framework, including domains such as bars, restaurants, childcare, and religious gatherings,  revealed high granularity and nuance between state-level policy taxonomies, with some domains (e.g. restaurants and movie theaters) showing bimodal policy intensity distributions compatible with binary (yes/no) coding, and some domains (e.g. childcare and religious gatherings) showing broader variability that would be missed without more granular coding. The framework may be useful for describing specific stages of closing and reopening, as well as for comparing the effects of different policies in various areas.

Lane et al. (Dec 8, 2020). Strengthening Policy Coding Methodologies to Improve COVID-19 Disease Modeling and Policy Responses: A Proposed Coding Framework and Recommendations. BMC Medical Research Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01174-w