Tobacco Use and Attitude Survey

To determine if your tobacco prevention efforts result in changes in tobacco use or attitudes you need to start with baseline data. This data will give you a picture of what your campus looks like right now. By collecting this data every year, or every two years, you will be able to identify if use rates and attitudes are changing.

A Word of Advice

Be sure you gain approval for a survey before implementing it. On some campuses the group that reviews surveys and decides if they can be used is called the Internal Review Board (IRB) or Human Subjects Committee (HSC). This group may be housed in the following departments on campus:

• Sponsored Programs Office
• Graduate School
• Grants and Contracts Office
• Regulatory Compliance Office
• Office of Institutional Research
• Office of Statistics and Measurement

However, your campus may not have a formal IRB/HSC, and instead you may need to contact your Dean of Students Office, Registrar, or Provost's Office to gain permission to use a survey.

Depending on your process, gaining approval to implement a survey can take anywhere from two weeks to two months! Be sure to build this step into your planning.

Surveys

You have some options for gathering information from students. Ideally, you would survey students with a tobacco-specific survey in order to gain the most information about the subject. The BACCHUS Network™ created a survey for this purpose: The Tobacco Use and Attitude Survey (TUAS). This short, under 40-questions survey focuses on students' use of a variety of tobacco products as well as their attitudes and perceptions of tobacco-related policies and activities.

Once completed, the TUAS provides campuses with information concerning student behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions surrounding the following issues:

• Frequency and patterns of tobacco use
• Types of tobacco use
• Reasons for tobacco use
• Perceptions of tobacco use on campus
• Beliefs about the effects of tobacco
• Tobacco industry targeting of college students
• Tobacco prevention/education messages
• Programs and policies

The TUAS is designed to keep responses confidential and therefore cannot and should not be seen as a diagnostic tool toward treatment.

For more information on the Tobacco Use and Attitude Survey, contact The BACCHUS Network™ at (303) 871-0901.

More Surveys

If you decide not to use The BACCHUS Network™'s TUAS, you still will want to collect some baseline data in order to measure your progress. The following surveys have a few questions about tobacco already built into their questions:

• Core Survey
• National College Health Assessment

In addition, on some surveys you are able to add a few questions specific to your campus. You may want to consider adding tobacco related questions, particularly questions about students' attitudes and perceptions of tobacco use and policies, to these already existing surveys.