The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: This study is to identify a set of latent variables underlying the attitudinal questions in the California Adult Tobacco Survey (CATS), and to develop a higher order “social norm change” paradigm that attempts to reflect the California Tobacco Control Program's priority areas. These finings would support the theoretical foundation of social norm change and establish a measurement framework to help California monitor its comprehensive tobacco control program.

Methods: We analyzed CATS data from 1997-2004 (n=33,907). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to determine the nature of the underlying factors that reflect the “social norm change” paradigm and to reveal the underlying structure (latent variables) from a large set of attitudinal questions.

Results: We found six first-order latent variables underlying the nineteen attitudinal questions. The higher order latent constructs were government regulation and protection (GRP), Second Hand Smoke (SHS), and Tobacco Industry Manipulation (TIM). The second order factor loadings showed that the final social norm change paradigm consists of three main constructs that are related to the primary activities and tools required to change social norms in tobacco control practices. The SHS and TIM constructs are core components of the California program and can be monitored using these latent variables. The GRP construct consists of various components that based on the loadings are contradictory (including product regulation, youth access and advertising restrictions). This may suggest that this area is extremely complicated to influence with a simple straightforward message since beliefs across a variety of topics are intertwined.