The proposed research develops methods for measuring tobacco control policy effort within local government efforts which take into account policy design, policy enforcement, and policy process (eg, the commitment and capacity of implementing agencies) have been developed to measure local efforts in other policy areas. Development of similarly refined and useful measures is feasible in the area of tobacco control policy. Such measures will advance evaluation technologies useful in community intervention research, improve our ability to identify manipulable community-level factors that foster increased policy effort, and make it possible to monitor real progress toward national health-promotion policy goals for local jurisdictions. A multi-stage plan for developing and testing a key informant survey instrument and sampling protocol is proposed. A telephone-administered survey will be developed, tested, and revised in successive stages in three matched pairs of COMMIT (intervention and control) communities. Extensive on-site case study investigations will assure a sound theoretical and empirical basis for the proposed measures, and will provide valuable insights into community- level factors (targeted by COMMIT) that enhance or impede tobacco policy efforts. The final instrument will be tested in a supplemental sample of non-COMMIT communities. Though the number of communities examined is too small to permit statistical tests of hypotheses, the findings are expected to be informative, preliminarily, regarding COMMITs impact on policy. The methods, results, and experience derived from the proposed study will be useful in developing a full-scale investigation of the COMMIT trial's impact on policy effort, in evaluating other community- based interventions where tobacco policy change is an objective, and in monitoring nation-wide local policy efforts based on nationally representative samples.
