Policy actors as data integrators: mixing data in tobacco control evaluation and assessment

Tobacco control policies are complex with the potential for significant health effects. The public health actors and regulators who design, influence, and implement these policies place a high value on the evidence base that underpins them, engaging in scientific and applied debates about how to evaluate the success of existing policies and justify new actions. To investigate the construction of this evidence base, we conducted interviews with 40 individuals involved in formulating, advising, and implementing flavour restrictions for tobacco products. Our interviews inform case studies of six jurisdictions in three US states, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands. We find that tobacco policy stakeholders, which include regulators and public health personnel, play a vital role as data integrators in the construction of this evidence base: they bring together disparate types and sources of information to create synthetic evaluations of tobacco control policies that incorporate the complexity of the policy environment and differential impacts on population subgroups. Significantly, data integration is not easy to replicate or automate; should these positions be lost due to funding cuts as political priorities shift in the US and globally, the capacity they add to our policymaking and research systems will be difficult to restore.