Components in tobacco-free school policies—A coding tool for assessment

Abstract

Objective

To develop an instrument to examine tobacco-free campus policy components.

Participants

Missouri two- and four-year, specialized/technical, and religious colleges and universities (N = 76). Methods: The instrument was informed via literature review and expert interviews. Coder agreement was strong (κ = .80). Qualitative policy language examples were identified.

Results

Model policy components including consideration for population, prohibited products, location restrictions, enforcement, consequences, promotions, communications, cessation, designated smoking areas and exemptions; comprehensive policies included all populations, for all tobacco products, and at all locations on the campus. Nineteen campuses had comprehensive tobacco-free policies, five had comprehensive smoke-free policies (cigarettes and e-cigarettes), and no policy included all model components. Fifty-two were non-comprehensive.

Conclusions

This instrument can allow campuses to identify components for comprehensive and model tobacco-free campus policies and assist officials in improving policy language. Future research can use this instrument to examine the effectiveness of components and their impact on tobacco use outcomes.

Keywords:

• Campus
• policy
• smoke-free
• tobacco
• tobacco-free

Authors’ note

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [GC], upon reasonable request.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments to our undergraduate student research team at (Rachel Henderson, Aravind Kalathil, Rebecca Price, Leyton Rebori, and Kamilla Sarvestani).

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of United States and this study was exempt from human subjects review by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Missouri.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health (19-0211-OF-19).