DOI: 10.3886/icpsr39058.v1
title: References to Evidence-Based Program Registry Websites for Behavioral Health in U.S. State Government Statutes and Regulations, [United States], 2011-2020
title: Version 1

description: U.S. state governments have the responsibility to regulate and license behavioral health care interventions, such as for addiction and mental illness, with increasing emphasis on evidence-based programs (EBPs). A serious obstacle to this is lack of clarity or agreement about what constitutes "evidence-based." This study's purpose was to determine the extent to which and in what contexts web-based Evidence-Based Program Registries (EBPRs) are referenced in state government statutes and regulations ("mandates") concerning behavioral health care. The study employed the Westlaw Legal Research Database to search for 30 known EBPR websites relevant to behavioral health care within the statutes and regulations of all 50 states. Questions of interest included prevalence of EBPR references in statutes and regulations, purpose of references to EBPRs, context of references to EBPRs, and service areas represented by the mandate.
description: This study sought to document how often and in what ways state governments reference EBRRs in statutes and regulations relevant to behavioral health care. The research questions were as follows:

To what extent are EBPR websites referenced in U.S. state government mandates regarding EBPs and practices in behavioral health care?
Why and how are EBPR websites referenced in state mandates--that is, for which service areas, for what purposes, and in what contexts?
Do states vary in how often they reference EBPR websites in their mandates?
description: This study used a mixed methods approach, wherein the researchers used open coding of the statutes and regulations to identify a set of codes to classify the context and purposes of references to EBPRs and then applied those codes to the data as part of a quantitative analysis of the presence of the identified themes. The Westlaw Legal Research Database was used to search for mentions of EBPRs in state mandates. The search included 28 federally and nonfederally sponsored EBPRs that were identified in prior research, as well as two additional databases meeting the definition of EBPR. The search string utilized both the official names of the 30 targeted EBPRs, as well as commonly used abbreviations and variants of their official names.
description: The dataset contains variables with information about each reference to EBPRs in state mandates that were identified from the database searches. These include the state represented by the mandate, the type of mandate, and the date on which the mandate took effect; the service area group of the EBP (mental health, substance abuse, juvenile justice, education, child welfare, and general behavioral health); the EBPR that was referenced and the context of the reference; and two summary variables that refer to whether the mandate references more than one EBPR and the number of EBPRs referenced by the mandate.
description: All U.S. state mandates related to behavioral health that included a reference to one of 30 evidence-based practice registers (n = 33) were included in the study.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: References to Evidence-Based Program Registry Websites for Behavioral Health in U.S. State Government Statutes and Regulations, [United States], 2011-2020
description: All U.S. state mandates related to behavioral health that included a reference to one of 30 evidence-based practice registries (n = 33). Smallest Geographic Unit: State
description: web scraping