Citation

Jernigan DH. Health Promot. Pract. 2011; 12(3): 336-340.

Affiliation

Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Society for Public Health Education, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1524839911404233

PMID

21518922

Abstract

Self-regulation is a common strategy used by industries to avoid or supplement statutory health and safety regulation of their products and practices. The public health experience with self-regulation in the alcohol industry provides methods and lessons relevant to health educators and advocates working in other public health fields. Methods for and examples and limitations of monitoring content and placement of marketing messages are described. The alcohol experience shows that, although self-regulation has many drawbacks in terms of protecting the health of the public, there are tools available for valid monitoring of self-regulated activities that, when combined with aggressive dissemination of results to media and policy makers, can make self-regulation more accountable and build an evidence base for effective measures to be taken.

Language: en