The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project) is an international research collaboration across more than 29 countries - Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, China, Mexico, Uruguay, New Zealand, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Bhutan, Ireland, Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Mauritius, Kenya, Zambia, United Arab Emirates, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Japan. The primary objective of the ITC Project is to conduct rigorous evaluation of the psychosocial and behavioural effects of national-level tobacco control policies of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The ITC Project is conducting large-scale prospective cohort surveys of tobacco use to evaluate FCTC policies.

Each ITC Survey includes key measures for each FCTC policy domain that are identical or functionally similar across the 29+ countries to facilitate cross-country comparisons. The evaluation studies conducted from the ITC Surveys take advantage of natural experiments created when an ITC country implements a policy: changes in policy relevant variables in that country from pre- to post-policy survey waves are compared to other ITC countries where that policy has not changed. This research design provides high levels of internal validity, allowing more confident judgments regarding the possible causal impact of the policy.

A longitudinal cohort survey is simply a survey that measures the same variables across different populations, or countries in the case of ITC, and retains participants from year-to-year to monitor change in overall attitudes, knowledge, or behaviour within the population over time.

Research Methods Publications

• The Conceptual Framework of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project
• Evaluating the Effectiveness of Smoke-free Policies, IARC Handbook of Cancer Prevention, Volume 13
• Is web interviewing a good alternative to telephone interviewing? Findings from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Netherlands Survey
• Methods of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) China Survey

Interviewing Methods

The original ITC Surveys were conducted using telephone interviewing, and this technique continues to be used in the new countries that have been added to the ITC Project.

With the introduction of ITC-Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Thailand), a new face-to-face interview was conducted with respondents. Telephone interviewing tends to be used in high-income ITC countries while face-to-face interviewing is typically used in low- and middle-income countries. Web interviewing is also used in some countries, either exclusively (e.g., the Netherlands) or in conjunction with telephone interviewing (e.g., Canada, the United State, the United Kingdom and Australia).

For a more detailed account on how the samples were obtained, please consult Technical Reports.

External Researcher Data Request

Please review the Data Guidelines before submitting an External Researcher Data Request. Email the completed data request forms to: itc@uwaterloo.ca