MMC

The tobacco product market and policy landscape evolve quickly, necessitating rapid development of accurate assessments and materials for tobacco regulatory science. Thus, there is a need for flexibility to ensure that measures and product materials used in survey and experimental research maintain their timeliness, accuracy, and relevance. Thus, many subfields within tobacco regulatory science have an ongoing need for their measures and materials to be regularly adapted to keep pace with these rapid changes in the tobacco market and regulatory landscape, and to provide data relevant to different populations. To meet this need, the Measures and Materials Core (MMC) will use creative and rigorous methodologies to rapidly develop, refine, validate, and characterize assessments and materials for internal use by USC TCORS projects and for outward dissemination to the national network of tobacco regulatory scientists. The MMC will collect information from key sources to ensure USC TCORS stays abreast of developments in the tobacco market and policy landscape and addresses the needs of various populations. The MMC will also work with TCORS project investigators to execute measure and materials development, refinement, and validation designed to impact their projects. This includes a priori development survey assessment and psychometric testing (with Data Processing and Analysis Core [DPAC] analytic assistance) for projects 1-3 and creating experimental stimuli that are realistic and representative of the market for Projects 2 and 4. MMC will also coordinate flavoring constituent analysis of concept flavor products identified in the research projects (Projects 1 and 2) to triangulate self-reports of the sensory attributes about these flavors (e.g., fruity) and the flavoring chemicals detected in them. The MMC has three aims: (1) To collect information about changes in the tobacco market and policies, and how different populations are impacted, to identify needs for measure and material adaptations; (2) To develop, refine, and validate measures and materials for use in research; and (3) to obtain information on flavorings and other constituents in non-combustible flavored products, including concept flavors. Overall, the MMC will provide a critical service to the projects and pilot investigators and the tobacco regulatory science community. In addition to serving the USC TCORS, the MMC will work with the Administrative Core, which will disseminate the MMC’s novel measures, experimental stimuli, and constituent analysis results, as well as supporting documentation outward on the TCORS website and other national venues.