The Alcohol Policy Information System: A Tool for Evidence-Based Policy Analysis

The Alcohol Policy Information System:  A Tool for Evidence-Based Policy Analysis

This paper will introduce prevention researchers to the Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS), a project of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.  APIS provides web-based, user-searchable access to authoritative, detailed, and comparable information on thirty-three alcohol-related policies in the United States, at both State and Federal levels [http://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/].

We will describe how APIS policies are developed and provide a “tour” of the APIS website, using as examples two policy topics of on-going interest to alcohol researchers: Beverage Service Training and Hosting Underage Drinking Parties.  We will also describe scholarly papers and other policy-related research resources posted on the APIS website.

Designed primarily as a tool for researchers, APIS encourages and facilitates research on the effects and effectiveness of alcohol-related policies by allowing researchers to compare policy changes against changes in outcomes as a way of studying the effects of policy change.  To date APIS has been used in over forty papers to study the impacts of such diverse policies as house party laws and alcohol taxation.

APIS provides the following information on each policy topic: a brief narrative description; a list of definitions (if necessary); a summary of relevant Federal law (if any); tables comparing policies on that topic across jurisdictions (as of a particular date as well as over a period of time specified by the user); a brief explanation of the public health-related variables used in creating the tables; notes explaining the limitations of the information provided; charts and maps; relevant statutory and regulatory citations; and references to selected Federal publications.  All tables may be downloaded in a format suitable for many spreadsheet and statistical programs.

Central to APIS’ approach is the integration of legal and social science research to develop public health-related variables that characterize each policy, and the coding of these variables from current and historic statutes and regulations across the fifty States, the District of Columbia, and Federal law.  Since APIS was rolled out in 2003, these variables have been used by researchers in peer reviewed studies to index policy strength in cross-sectional or longitudinal studies of policy effectiveness, to track policy implementation over time, and to relate policy adoption to socio-political factors in the States.