Arizona's Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, signed into law in April 2010, is already adversely affecting public health in the state. Our findings from a study on childhood obesity in Flagstaff suggest that the law changed health-seeking behaviors of residents of a predominantly Latino neighborhood by increasing fear, limiting residents' mobility, and diminishing trust of officials. These changes could exacerbate barriers to healthy living, limit access to care, and affect the overall safety of the neighborhood. Documentation of the on-the-ground impact of Arizona's law and similar state-level immigration policies is urgently needed. To inform effective policymaking, such research must be community engaged and include safety measures beyond the usual protocols.

Context: The effects of prophylactic ankle braces on lower extremity functional performance in healthy participants have not been studied extensively.Objective: To determine if prophylactic ankle braces affected multidirectional reach distances during a test of dynamic balance.Design: Crossover. Setting: Laboratory.Patients or Other Participants: Thirty-six healthy, physically active volunteers (18 men, 18 women; age 5 23.6 6 2.7 years, height 5 173.8 6 9.3 cm, mass 5 74.4 6 12.7 kg, reach-leg length 5 91.9 6 5.1 cm).Intervention(s): Volunteers performed balance testing in 3 conditions: unbraced, while wearing a semirigid ankle brace, and while wearing a lace-up ankle brace.Main Outcome Measure(s): We used the Star Excursion Balance Test, calculating the mean of 3 attempts in 8 directions (anterior, anterior-medial, medial, posterior-medial, posterior, posterior-lateral, lateral, and anterior-lateral), normalized by the participant's reach-leg length. Data were collected after 6 practice attempts for each of the conditions according to a balanced Latin square.Results: Bracing condition had no effect (P . .05) on any of the Star Excursion Balance Test directional measures. The largest mean difference due to bracing was 2.5% between the lace-up brace condition and the control in the posterior reach direction. This indicates that the actual reach differences due to bracing were less than 5.08 cm (2 inches) in length.Conclusions: Clinicians can be confident that the prophylactic use of ankle braces does not disrupt lower extremity dynamic balance during a reaching task in healthy participants.

Community-engaged approaches to research and practice continue to show success in addressing health equity and making long-term change for partnership relationships and structures of power. The usefulness of these approaches is either diminished or bolstered by community trust, which can be challenging for partnerships to achieve. In this research note we present an example process for recruiting, interviewing, and hiring community researchers as a starting place for capacity building and for laying the foundation for data collection and analysis in health-related community projects.

Thorough data management is crucial for the protection of people who participate in research and researcher ability to share results with the public. The impact of inadequate adherence to data management is particularly evident in small field sites and among vulnerable populations. Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) presents exciting opportunities for multimedia and multi-sectoral dissemination of research results and policy change, especially concerning the impact of research on health equity for underrepresented populations. In this article we discuss how we defined data boundaries and protections to adhere to ethical standards while also prioritizing data dissemination. Although complex partnerships can introduce additional risks to data oversight, data management practices can also increase opportunities for wide-reaching dissemination. We hope to contribute to the literature on data sharing in multi-partnership projects to bolster the impact of dissemination while also protecting participants and populations who chose to collaborate in research and policy practices.