International Tobacco Control

Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project)

The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project) is an international collaboration of tobacco control researchers whose mission is to evaluate the psychosocial and behavioral effects of national-level tobacco control policies throughout the world. The ITC Project consists of parallel annual surveys being conducted in 14 countries, inhabited by over half of the world’s smokers: Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, China, Mexico, Uruguay, New Zealand, France, and Germany. Additional ITC Surveys are being planned in several other countries, including India, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Sudan. All ITC Surveys are designed from the same conceptual framework and methods, and the survey questions are designed to be identical or functionally equivalent in order to allow strong comparisons across countries.

The ITC Project is evaluating the policies of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)—the first ever health treaty, which has been ratified by 148 countries. The ITC surveys have measures of many of the FCTC policies, which include:

• More prominent warning labels
• Removal of “light”, “mild”, and other deceptive descriptors and brand imagery
• Restrictions or prohibitions of tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship
• Higher taxation
• Laws to reduce/eliminate tobacco smoke pollution (also known as secondhand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke)

The objectives of the ITC Project are to:

1. Conduct rigorous evaluation of FCTC policies at the level of the individual smoker
   
2. To understand the causal mechanisms responsible for policy impact—to understand how and why a policy had its impact
   
3. To actively disseminate research findings not only to researchers, but especially to policymakers, advocates, and the tobacco control community more widely in order to promote strong, evidence-based implementation of the FCTC

The initial phase of the ITC Project is a random-digit-dialed phone survey of over 8,000 adult smokers throughout four countries: Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.This initial study follows a panel of participants over the next five years, and incorporates Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) that are likely to be implemented over the next four years in at least one of the four countries with a series of multiple natural experiments.

The ITC Research Team includes tobacco control researchers across the four countries. The Principal Investigators are:
   Geoffrey Fong - University of Waterloo, Canada, 
   Ron Borland - The Cancer Council Victoria, Australia
   Michael Cummings - Roswell Park Cancer Institute, United States
   Gerard Hastings - University of Stirling, United Kingdom.

Co-Investigators are Ann McNeill, United Kingdom; Gary Giovino, Andrew Hyland, Frank Chaloupka, Fritz Laux, Hana Ross and Mohammad Siahpush, United States; Mary Thompson, Steve Brown, David Hammond, Sharon Campbell, Mark Zanna, and Paul McDonald, Canada; and Melanie Wakefield, Australia.