Research Library

From an early age, children spend many hours interacting with screens: phones, tablets, and laptops. A new policy brief from the Child Health Policy Program explains the importance of unstructured free play for healthy child development and recommends four policy approaches to reduce screen time and ensure children’s well-being in the digital age.

Non-medical drivers of health, also known as social determinants of health, have a significant impact on health outcomes. As fellow Sandra McKay and her co-authors explain, adequate funding to identify and address non-medical drivers — housing and food insecurity, transport issues, and financial strain — can improve patients’ health and health care delivery systems, while also reducing costs.

The number of children walking and biking to school has been in decline for more than 50 years, yet associated death and injury rates remain high. In a new brief, nonresident fellow Zoabe Hafeez and co-author Shruti Natarajan review child pedestrian and bicyclist injuries in Houston, analyzing the worst hotspots and identifying how infrastructure improvements can have outsized benefits.

Regulating firearms under the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA) — just like any other product — could enhance their safety, writes fellow Sandra McKay. She explains how the CPSA could investigate misfirings and require safety information to be distributed with every gun sale.

Hostile immigration enforcement policies and anti-immigrant actions against refugees and asylum seekers are causing trauma to migrant families and exposing them to dangerous living conditions on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Building on the success of hunter education courses in Texas and experience in other states, fellow Sandra McKay and other Texas physicians explain how mandatory firearm safety courses and waiting periods for young firearm buyers could reduce gun violence.

This brief demonstrates that the stories and voices of people on the move should be noticed and reflected, and that people on the move should have a leading say regarding the contexts and conditions that affect them, as well as how they are represented.

Addressing young refugees’ health needs in adolescence can prevent negative health outcomes in the transition to adulthood and affirms their rights to equitable health access and dignified lives.

The layered and intersectional implications of Lebanon's current political and economic crisis have been felt hardest by the country’s most vulnerable and marginalized communities — predominantly the country’s millions of refugees and migrants.

The phenomena of Syrian refugee women marrying Egyptian men whom they barely know soon after their arrival has drawn the attention of media and advocacy groups. Such marriages are often facilitated through marriage brokers, social media, and religious groups. In contrast to existing narratives that view this type of marriage as exploitative, the author demonstrates how the concept of “marriage for refuge” offers a better lens through which to analyze the relationship between forced migration and marriage.