Given the multidisciplinary perspectives of public health law research, or legal epidemiology, and the wide range of topics included in the discipline, the use of commonly-understood pictures to illustrate the ways in which law and health interact can be invaluable.

Ranging from laws that prohibit individual behaviors, to laws that provide authority to act, to laws that regulate organizational practices, legal epidemiology seeks to understand the mechanisms by which laws can improve health; visualizing these mechanisms in diagrams is an important tool for achieving such an understanding.

Here we review some basic conventions used to create visual models, evaluate relevant examples of models in published legal epidemiology studies, and offer recommendations for constructing clear and informative models.

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Authors:

• Jeffrey W. Swanson, PhD, Duke University
• Jennifer K. Ibrahim, PhD, Temple University