The future of household telephone surveys on tobacco

Ontario Tobacco Research Unit 3 The Future of Household Telephone Surveys on Tobacco: Methodological and Contextual Issues Introduction Background to the Working Session In November 2008, the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit (OTRU) hosted the Ontario Tobacco Control Conference: Tobacco Control for the 21st Century: Challenges in Research and Evaluation. [...] The conference was built around a series of keynote speakers and nine concurrent working sessions.1 The working session that is the focus of this Special Report is The Future of Telephone Surveys on Tobacco: Methodological and Contextual Issues. [...] Objectives of the Working Session Household survey data are an important tool for tobacco control, used for research, monitoring and evaluation, and policy-making, and they have a long, if somewhat checkered, history in Canada.2 However, methodological and contextual issues increasingly affect the representativeness of surveys and the portrayal of smokers in household surveys of the general popula [...] The Future of Household Telephone Surveys on Tobacco: Methodological and Contextual Issues The focus of the working session was methodological and contextual issues related to the quality of data from tobacco-use surveys, particularly surveys employing the telephone. [...] The objective was to share information on the issues, get a better understanding of the scope and nature of the problem, identify actual and potential solutions, and lay the groundwork for some constructive future developments.