MMC

NIH RePORTER · NIH · U54 · $293,830 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY: MEASURES AND MATERIALS CORE (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. Additionally, the US population is diverse across several demographic characteristics, and some populations are disproportionately impacted by tobacco use and targeted marketing practices, necessitating survey and experimental research to develop and use culturally appropriate measures. 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 diverse 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 diverse 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.

Key facts

NIH application ID
10664813
Project number
2U54CA180905-11
Recipient
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Principal Investigator
Matthew Gesner Kirkpatrick
Activity code
U54
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2023
Award amount
$293,830
Award type
2
Project period
2013-09-19 → 2028-08-31