Tracking the Media and Political Impacts of State Level Tobacco Control: SmokeLess States Evaluation

The Foundation's program, SmokeLess States: National Tobacco Policy Initiative, was designed to support development and implementation of comprehensive statewide strategies to reduce tobacco use through education, treatment, and policy initiatives. Monitoring and directing progress in state-level tobacco control requires information on many variables that impact efforts to achieve program and policy outcomes. The purpose of this project is to integrate and analyze data from existing surveillance efforts and add three new data collection efforts--legislative tracking, an expanded system to track newspaper coverage of tobacco control issues, and a state Strength of Tobacco Control survey. These efforts are designed to help inform and assess the work of the Foundation's newly expanded SmokeLess States (SLS) program by focusing on the program's important interim goals (by tracking proposed legislation and media coverage of tobacco control) and developing a new measure of the strengths and weaknesses of SLS coalitions for the purposes of guiding SLS technical assistance efforts and identifying the core elements required for program success.