Item Development and Performance of Tobacco Product and Regulation Perception Items for the Health Information...

Emerging tobacco products have become increasingly popular, and the US Food and Drug Administration extended its authority to all products meeting the definition of a tobacco product in 2016. These changes may lead to shifts in public perceptions about tobacco products and regulation, and national surveys are attempting to assess these perceptions at the population level. This article describes the item development and cognitive interviewing of the tobacco product and regulation perception items included in two tobacco-focused cycles of the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS-FDA), referred to as HINTS-FDA.

Cognitive interviewing was used to investigate how respondents comprehended and responded to tobacco product and regulation perception items. Adult participants (n = 20) were selected purposively to oversample current tobacco users and were interviewed in two iterative rounds. Weighted descriptive statistics from the fielded HINTS-FDA surveys (N = 5474) were also calculated.

Items were generally interpreted as intended, and participants meaningfully discriminated between tobacco products when assessing addiction perceptions. Response selection issues involved inconsistent reporting among participants with little knowledge or ambivalent opinions about either government regulation or tobacco products and ingredients, which resolved when a "don't know" response option was included in the survey. The fielded survey found that a non-negligible proportion of the population do not have clear perceptions of emerging tobacco products or government regulation.

A "don't know" response option is helpful for items assessing many emerging tobacco products but presents several analytic challenges that should be carefully considered. Multiple items assessing specific tobacco product and regulation perception items are warranted in future surveys.

The findings from this study can serve as a foundation for future surveys that assess constructs related to emerging tobacco products, harm perceptions across multiple tobacco products, and tobacco-related government regulatory activities. The data provide unique insight into item-specific motivation for selecting a "don't know" response option for tobacco survey items.