Methods for evaluating tobacco control policies.

IARC convened a working group of international tobacco control experts to propose a framework for guiding the evaluation of tobacco control policies expected to be formulated worldwide in response to WHO-FCTC. This new volume 12 in the series of IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention in Tobacco Control concentrates on evaluating the impact of societal level interventions to control tobacco use and it is offered as a guide to evaluators in the field. The Handbook covers how the effects of a policy are determined, the core constructs for understanding how and why a given policy works, the potential moderator variables to consider when evaluating a given policy and the data sources that might be useful for evaluation. The Handbook includes logic models outlining relevant constructs for evaluating the effectiveness of policies on tobacco taxation, smoke-free environments, tobacco product regulations, limits on tobacco marketing communications, product labelling, anti-tobacco public communication campaigns and tobacco use cessation interventions. Additionally, it provides examples of measures used to assess key constructs, with special attention to measurement issues with survey methods. Descriptions of sources of data on tobacco control policies, tobacco production and trade, and repositories of youth and adult surveillance surveys are presented as well.