Laura A Schmidt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685461 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura A Schmidt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura A |
| FAMILY NAME | Schmidt |
| SIGNATURE | SCHMIDT L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Global Health Sciences, University of California San Francisco, 550 16th Street, Third Floor, San Francisco, CA, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6301-5280 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Purdue's development of abuse-deterrent formulation opioids as a response to market competition
Background: The opioid overdose crisis constituted one of the greatest public emergencies in US history. The overpromotion and overprescription of oxycodone and Purdue Pharma's branded formulation, OxyContin, have been implicated as key drivers of the opioid overdose crisis. This study sought to understand Purdue's motivations in developing opioid abuse-deterrent formulations, drugs designed to reduce misuse, abuse, and diversion of prescription …
Enacting healthy checkout policies
Objective: To examine policy processes and industry opposition surrounding the first US healthy checkout ordinances (HCO), which mandate nutritional standards for foods and beverages displayed in grocery checkout areas. Design: Qualitative case study comparison using Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, triangulating city records, advocacy materials and key informant interviews. Setting: Local governments of Berkeley and Perris, California, USA.…
The impact of a water promotion and access intervention on elementary school students in the presence of food insecurity
Objective: School-based interventions encouraging children to replace sugar-sweetened beverages with water show promise for reducing child overweight. However, students with child food insecurity (CFI) may not respond to nutrition interventions like children who are food-secure. Design: The Water First cluster-randomised trial found that school water access and promotion prevented child overweight and increased water intake. This secondary analys…
De-normalizing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption
Among lower-income populations, social norms and attitudes towards the healthfulness of SSBs meaningfully declined over time, with smaller tax-related effects. SSB taxes as well as the local media attention they generate appear to affect people's perceptions of SSBs. Pairing SSB taxes with messaging campaigns may be more effective in de-normalizing SSB consumption
Did a workplace sugar-sweetened beverage sales ban reduce anxiety-related sugar-sweetened beverage consumption during the Covid-19 pandemic
Objective: Workplace sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) sales bans can reduce SSB consumption. Because stress and anxiety can promote sugar consumption, we examined whether anxiety among hospital employees during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with changes in SSB consumption and explored whether this relationship varied by exposure to a workplace SSB sales ban. Design: In a prospective, controlled trial of workplace SSB sales bans, we examined …
Understanding the science-policy interface in urban climate governance from a co-production perspective
Urban governance, the interplay of governmental bodies with other actors shaping decision-making and its implementation, plays a key role for mitigation and adaptation measures in cities. While knowledge co-production is advanced as an instrumental approach to support climate action, a gap between knowledge and implementation persists. The objective of the article is to better understand the complex nature of urban climate governance with which s…
Controlled trial of a workplace sales ban on sugar-sweetened beverages
Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a workplace sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) sales ban on reducing SSB consumption in employees, including those with cardiometabolic disease risk factors. Design: A controlled trial of ethnically diverse, full-time employees who consumed SSB heavily (sales ban n 315; control n 342). Outcomes included standardised measures of change in SSB consumption in the workplace (primary) and at home between baseline…
Alignment in local approaches to alcohol and cannabis control policy
We found few similarities between local alcohol and cannabis control policies. California's experience suggests that, as governments around the world legalize cannabis, lessons learned from regulating alcohol are not routinely applied to cannabis, particularly in communities distinguished by high social and economic advantages
Accumulating Birth Histories Across Surveys for Improved Estimates of Child Mortality
Producing reliable estimates for childhood mortality rates is essential to monitor progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and correctly evaluate policies designed to reduce childhood mortality rates. Different model-based approaches have been proposed to assess levels and trends in childhood mortality indicators. In this paper, we propose a design-based complement that accumulates birth histories across differ…
Equity in Coverage of Local Cannabis Control Policies in California, 2020‒2021
Objectives. To assess whether cannabis control policies that may protect public health were adopted evenly across California localities with differing sociodemographic compositions. Methods. From November 2020 to January 2021, we measured cannabis control policies for 241 localities across California and linked them to data on the characteristics of the communities affected by these policies. We evaluated whether disadvantaged communities were mo…
Missed Opportunities
Despite a growing body of evidence showing that sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxes nudge consumers away from SSBs, we lack an understanding of people's awareness and perceptions of SSB taxes and whether tax awareness and perceptions differ based on sociodemographic characteristics. We used serial cross-sectional study intercept surveys ( n = 2715) in demographically diverse neighborhoods of Berkeley and Oakland in 2015 and 2017, and San Francis…
Healthy beverage initiatives in higher education
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The Objectives of Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research. A Conceptual Framework for a Reflective and Reflexive Practise
Transferring Racial/Ethnic Marketing Strategies From Tobacco to Food Corporations
Objectives. To investigate the transfer of marketing knowledge and infrastructure for targeting racial/ethnic minorities from the tobacco to the food and beverage industry in the United States. Methods. We analyzed internal industry documents between April 2018 and April 2019 from the University of California San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, triangulated with other sources. Results. In the 1980s, Philip Morris Companies pur…
Preemption in Tobacco Control
Preemption—when a higher level of government limits the authority of a lower level to enact new policies—has been devastating to tobacco control. We developed a preemption framework based on this experience for anticipating and responding to the possibility of preemption in other public health areas. We analyzed peer-reviewed literature, reports, and government documents pertaining to tobacco control preemption. We triangulated data and thematica…
Emerging threats of global preemption to nutrition labelling
Overconsumption of globalized commodities, including tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods, are among the most important non-communicable disease (NCD) risk factors (GBD 2016 Risk Factors Collaborators 2017). Transnational corporations (TNCs) increasingly market these commodities to vulnerable groups, including the young and the poor, and aggressively lobby governments for trade and investment agreements that constrain regulatory environment…
Social and Political Factors Associated With State-Level Legalization of Cannabis in the United States
Thirty-three U.S. states and the District of Columbia (DC) have legalized the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes and 10 states and DC have legalized marijuana for adult recreational use. This mirrors an international trend toward relaxing restrictions on marijuana. This article analyzes patterns in marijuana laws across U.S. states to shed light on the social and political forces behind the liberalization of marijuana policy following a long…
Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research
Sustainability problems call for collaborative solution finding. Lessons learnt from the transdisciplinary designs of three projects in the Global South include the need for a prephase to build balanced ownership, institutionalised and equal partnerships, and diversified approaches.Stakeholder (SH) involvement is a major and ever-challenging aspect of transdisciplinary research (TDR). Reflecting on three land management research projects (Carbioc…
Water Access in the United States
An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss an article in the journal which deals with a water access problem in the U.S. as of 2017, and it mentions inadequate hydration involving African Americans and Hispanic Americans, municipal water safety, and public trust in America
Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research
Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Med…
Young People’s More Permissive Views About Marijuana
Objectives. To determine whether state medical marijuana laws “send the wrong message,” that is, have a local influence on the views of young people about the risks of using marijuana. Methods. We performed multilevel, serial, cross-sectional analyses on 10 annual waves of the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2004–2013) nationally and for states with marijuana laws using individual- and state-level controls. Results. Living in medical m…
Schmidt et al. Respond
AffiliationsAll of the authors are with the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Laura A. Schmidt is also with the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, School of Medicine, UCSF. Joanne Spetz is also with the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, UCSF
Transforming Primary Care in the New Orleans Safety-net
BACKGROUND: The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is a key service delivery innovation in health reform. However, there are growing questions about whether the changes in clinics promoted by the PCMH model lead to improvements in the patient experience. OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that PCMH improvements in safety-net primary care clinics are associated with a more positive patient experience. RESEARCH DESIGN: Multilevel cross-sectional a…
Reconsidering the Effects of Poverty and Social Support on Health
Benefit or burden? A sociotechnical analysis of diagnostic computer kiosks in four California hospital emergency departments
The Objectives of Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research. A Conceptual Framework for a Reflective and Reflexive Practise
Reconsidering the Effects of Poverty and Social Support on Health
Problem Drinkers and the Welfare Bureaucracy
Local welfare systems in the United States have few incentives and no official mandate to address alcohol-related problems in their clientele. Nonetheless, problem drinkers remain a "disreputable" and problematic social service population: they pose a challenge to the bureaucratic efficiency and public image of welfare, as well as to the moral sensibilities and legal perceptions of the workers who staff these systems. This article charts the proc…
Interpersonal Violence Among Women Seeking Welfare
Objectives. Exposure to violence is a widespread problem among women who receive welfare benefits. Research has focused on partner violence among women with children on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), ignoring low-income women without dependent children who are eligible for General Assistance (GA). Methods. We report findings from a survey of 1235 women seeking TANF (N=1095) and GA (N=140) throughout a California county. Results. …
Transferring Racial/Ethnic Marketing Strategies From Tobacco to Food Corporations
Objectives. To investigate the transfer of marketing knowledge and infrastructure for targeting racial/ethnic minorities from the tobacco to the food and beverage industry in the United States. Methods. We analyzed internal industry documents between April 2018 and April 2019 from the University of California San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, triangulated with other sources. Results. In the 1980s, Philip Morris Companies pur…
Preemption in Tobacco Control
Preemption—when a higher level of government limits the authority of a lower level to enact new policies—has been devastating to tobacco control. We developed a preemption framework based on this experience for anticipating and responding to the possibility of preemption in other public health areas. We analyzed peer-reviewed literature, reports, and government documents pertaining to tobacco control preemption. We triangulated data and thematica…
Conflicts and Trade‐Offs due to Alcohol and Drugs
In this article, we explore how alcohol and drugs enter into the lives of welfare clients, affecting the ways by which they leave welfare. Our analysis draws on clients’ narrative accounts of circumstances surrounding their welfare exits. We find that substance abuse by clients or by those close to them can interfere with individual functioning and shape clients’ interactions with social networks and public agencies. This, in turn, may result in …
Social and Political Factors Associated With State-Level Legalization of Cannabis in the United States
Thirty-three U.S. states and the District of Columbia (DC) have legalized the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes and 10 states and DC have legalized marijuana for adult recreational use. This mirrors an international trend toward relaxing restrictions on marijuana. This article analyzes patterns in marijuana laws across U.S. states to shed light on the social and political forces behind the liberalization of marijuana policy following a long…
Barriers to Identifying Substance Abuse in the Reformed Welfare System
Substance abuse has been identified as a potential barrier to employment in the reformed welfare system. This article uses interviews with frontline welfare workers and policy makers to examine the process of identifying welfare clients for substance abuse services. Workers’ accounts reveal that official welfare policy, day‐to‐day work conditions, relationships with clients, and the unstated stigma surrounding substance abuse create an environmen…
Young People’s More Permissive Views About Marijuana
Objectives. To determine whether state medical marijuana laws “send the wrong message,” that is, have a local influence on the views of young people about the risks of using marijuana. Methods. We performed multilevel, serial, cross-sectional analyses on 10 annual waves of the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2004–2013) nationally and for states with marijuana laws using individual- and state-level controls. Results. Living in medical m…
Understanding the science-policy interface in urban climate governance from a co-production perspective
Urban governance, the interplay of governmental bodies with other actors shaping decision-making and its implementation, plays a key role for mitigation and adaptation measures in cities. While knowledge co-production is advanced as an instrumental approach to support climate action, a gap between knowledge and implementation persists. The objective of the article is to better understand the complex nature of urban climate governance with which s…
Emerging threats of global preemption to nutrition labelling
Overconsumption of globalized commodities, including tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods, are among the most important non-communicable disease (NCD) risk factors (GBD 2016 Risk Factors Collaborators 2017). Transnational corporations (TNCs) increasingly market these commodities to vulnerable groups, including the young and the poor, and aggressively lobby governments for trade and investment agreements that constrain regulatory environment…
Benefit or burden? A sociotechnical analysis of diagnostic computer kiosks in four California hospital emergency departments
The Effects of Failing to Include Hard-to-Reach Respondents in Longitudinal Surveys
Objectives. We sought to determine whether failure to locate hard-to-reach respondents in longitudinal studies causes biased and inaccurate study results. Methods. We performed a nonresponse simulation in a survey of 498 low-income women who received cash aid in a California county. Our simulation was based on a previously published analysis that found that women without children who applied for General Assistance experienced more violence than d…
Problem Drinkers and the Welfare Bureaucracy
Local welfare systems in the United States have few incentives and no official mandate to address alcohol-related problems in their clientele. Nonetheless, problem drinkers remain a "disreputable" and problematic social service population: they pose a challenge to the bureaucratic efficiency and public image of welfare, as well as to the moral sensibilities and legal perceptions of the workers who staff these systems. This article charts the proc…
Conflicts and Trade‐Offs due to Alcohol and Drugs
In this article, we explore how alcohol and drugs enter into the lives of welfare clients, affecting the ways by which they leave welfare. Our analysis draws on clients’ narrative accounts of circumstances surrounding their welfare exits. We find that substance abuse by clients or by those close to them can interfere with individual functioning and shape clients’ interactions with social networks and public agencies. This, in turn, may result in …
Interpersonal Violence Among Women Seeking Welfare
Objectives. Exposure to violence is a widespread problem among women who receive welfare benefits. Research has focused on partner violence among women with children on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), ignoring low-income women without dependent children who are eligible for General Assistance (GA). Methods. We report findings from a survey of 1235 women seeking TANF (N=1095) and GA (N=140) throughout a California county. Results. …
Barriers to Identifying Substance Abuse in the Reformed Welfare System
Substance abuse has been identified as a potential barrier to employment in the reformed welfare system. This article uses interviews with frontline welfare workers and policy makers to examine the process of identifying welfare clients for substance abuse services. Workers’ accounts reveal that official welfare policy, day‐to‐day work conditions, relationships with clients, and the unstated stigma surrounding substance abuse create an environmen…
The Effects of Failing to Include Hard-to-Reach Respondents in Longitudinal Surveys
Objectives. We sought to determine whether failure to locate hard-to-reach respondents in longitudinal studies causes biased and inaccurate study results. Methods. We performed a nonresponse simulation in a survey of 498 low-income women who received cash aid in a California county. Our simulation was based on a previously published analysis that found that women without children who applied for General Assistance experienced more violence than d…
Evaluation of Patient Centered Medical Home Practice Transformation Initiatives
BACKGROUND: The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) has become a widely cited solution to the deficiencies in primary care delivery in the United States. To achieve the magnitude of change being called for in primary care, quality improvement interventions must focus on whole-system redesign, and not just isolated parts of medical practices. METHODS: Investigators participating in 9 different evaluations of Patient Centered Medical Home implemen…
Reconsidering the Effects of Poverty and Social Support on Health
Benefit or burden? A sociotechnical analysis of diagnostic computer kiosks in four California hospital emergency departments
Transforming Primary Care in the New Orleans Safety-net
BACKGROUND: The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is a key service delivery innovation in health reform. However, there are growing questions about whether the changes in clinics promoted by the PCMH model lead to improvements in the patient experience. OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that PCMH improvements in safety-net primary care clinics are associated with a more positive patient experience. RESEARCH DESIGN: Multilevel cross-sectional a…
Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research
Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Med…
Young People’s More Permissive Views About Marijuana
Objectives. To determine whether state medical marijuana laws “send the wrong message,” that is, have a local influence on the views of young people about the risks of using marijuana. Methods. We performed multilevel, serial, cross-sectional analyses on 10 annual waves of the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2004–2013) nationally and for states with marijuana laws using individual- and state-level controls. Results. Living in medical m…
Schmidt et al. Respond
AffiliationsAll of the authors are with the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Laura A. Schmidt is also with the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, School of Medicine, UCSF. Joanne Spetz is also with the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, UCSF
Water Access in the United States
An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss an article in the journal which deals with a water access problem in the U.S. as of 2017, and it mentions inadequate hydration involving African Americans and Hispanic Americans, municipal water safety, and public trust in America
Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research
Sustainability problems call for collaborative solution finding. Lessons learnt from the transdisciplinary designs of three projects in the Global South include the need for a prephase to build balanced ownership, institutionalised and equal partnerships, and diversified approaches.Stakeholder (SH) involvement is a major and ever-challenging aspect of transdisciplinary research (TDR). Reflecting on three land management research projects (Carbioc…
Emerging threats of global preemption to nutrition labelling
Overconsumption of globalized commodities, including tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods, are among the most important non-communicable disease (NCD) risk factors (GBD 2016 Risk Factors Collaborators 2017). Transnational corporations (TNCs) increasingly market these commodities to vulnerable groups, including the young and the poor, and aggressively lobby governments for trade and investment agreements that constrain regulatory environment…
Social and Political Factors Associated With State-Level Legalization of Cannabis in the United States
Thirty-three U.S. states and the District of Columbia (DC) have legalized the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes and 10 states and DC have legalized marijuana for adult recreational use. This mirrors an international trend toward relaxing restrictions on marijuana. This article analyzes patterns in marijuana laws across U.S. states to shed light on the social and political forces behind the liberalization of marijuana policy following a long…
The Objectives of Stakeholder Involvement in Transdisciplinary Research. A Conceptual Framework for a Reflective and Reflexive Practise
Transferring Racial/Ethnic Marketing Strategies From Tobacco to Food Corporations
Objectives. To investigate the transfer of marketing knowledge and infrastructure for targeting racial/ethnic minorities from the tobacco to the food and beverage industry in the United States. Methods. We analyzed internal industry documents between April 2018 and April 2019 from the University of California San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, triangulated with other sources. Results. In the 1980s, Philip Morris Companies pur…
Preemption in Tobacco Control
Preemption—when a higher level of government limits the authority of a lower level to enact new policies—has been devastating to tobacco control. We developed a preemption framework based on this experience for anticipating and responding to the possibility of preemption in other public health areas. We analyzed peer-reviewed literature, reports, and government documents pertaining to tobacco control preemption. We triangulated data and thematica…
Missed Opportunities
Despite a growing body of evidence showing that sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxes nudge consumers away from SSBs, we lack an understanding of people's awareness and perceptions of SSB taxes and whether tax awareness and perceptions differ based on sociodemographic characteristics. We used serial cross-sectional study intercept surveys ( n = 2715) in demographically diverse neighborhoods of Berkeley and Oakland in 2015 and 2017, and San Francis…
Healthy beverage initiatives in higher education
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Accumulating Birth Histories Across Surveys for Improved Estimates of Child Mortality
Producing reliable estimates for childhood mortality rates is essential to monitor progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and correctly evaluate policies designed to reduce childhood mortality rates. Different model-based approaches have been proposed to assess levels and trends in childhood mortality indicators. In this paper, we propose a design-based complement that accumulates birth histories across differ…
Equity in Coverage of Local Cannabis Control Policies in California, 2020‒2021
Objectives. To assess whether cannabis control policies that may protect public health were adopted evenly across California localities with differing sociodemographic compositions. Methods. From November 2020 to January 2021, we measured cannabis control policies for 241 localities across California and linked them to data on the characteristics of the communities affected by these policies. We evaluated whether disadvantaged communities were mo…
Controlled trial of a workplace sales ban on sugar-sweetened beverages
Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a workplace sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) sales ban on reducing SSB consumption in employees, including those with cardiometabolic disease risk factors. Design: A controlled trial of ethnically diverse, full-time employees who consumed SSB heavily (sales ban n 315; control n 342). Outcomes included standardised measures of change in SSB consumption in the workplace (primary) and at home between baseline…
Alignment in local approaches to alcohol and cannabis control policy
We found few similarities between local alcohol and cannabis control policies. California's experience suggests that, as governments around the world legalize cannabis, lessons learned from regulating alcohol are not routinely applied to cannabis, particularly in communities distinguished by high social and economic advantages
Medicine (22 works) · Political science (18 works) · Environmental health (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Public health (9 works) · Nursing (8 works) · Demography (7 works)