The 2024 Olympics may be starting in a few weeks, but California’s Local Lead Agencies (LLAs) have been racing against the clock to complete their ECTC Data Collection in time. We are excited to declare that LLAs medaled in all four events— stores, parks, sidewalks, and MUH! 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept; if you’ve ever used a program that checks your spelling and grammar, you’ve used a form of AI! However, the release of products like ChatGPT has kicked off a boom in AI technology, and it is growing more sophisticated every day. 

So how does this AI boom affect our work in tobacco control evaluation? I took a deep dive into the topic to find out!

Once an intervention or evaluation activity is over, it can be important for those involved (project staff and volunteers) to reflect on what happened and discuss what worked, where there is room for improvement, and what any next steps should be. (See documenting organizational history.) Depending on how complex the activity was, this process could be fairly quick – anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two.

I joined TCEC in March of 2013, and here I am in April 2024 writing a newsletter article looking back at my 11 years with TCEC. It is a challenge to come up with a summary that does the time I have spent with TCEC justice. I don’t say that as a boast of myself, but I have been part of an amazing team that has managed to do so much. I have had the great fortune of working with great people, to work with a team that made my time at TCEC feel less like work, and more like a group of friends tossing ideas and coming up with creative content.

It is an exciting time in the public health world!  State and local policymakers are taking action to reduce the availability of the tobacco industry’s deadly products in the retail environment.

What's the point of giving feedback, anyway? Will my comments actually change anything? 

If you've interacted with the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center at any point, you've undoubtedly received requests for feedback— whether on a training, a webinar, or how satisfied you were with our technical assistance.

When you need to collect data, how do you know what’s important to ask? Do you brainstorm a list of questions? Or do you dust off an instrument your project has used in the past? If you wonder about that, the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center (TCEC) has an array of tools that can help!

TCEC has been my family for almost 6 years, and I’m sad to announce that we're parting ways. I started at TCEC in 2017 as an undergraduate research assistant.  What began as a part-time gig doing data entry and file management evolved into more than what I could have ever imagined. Through these years, I graduated with a B.S. in Statistics, earned a Master's degree in Public Health, and stayed on as a full-time associate with TCEC.

Evaluation report writing can be an intimidating task, especially when it comes to Final Evaluation Reports (FERs). Our website has many resources that can help with FER writing and hopefully ease some of that anxiety. However, after hearing from evaluators in the field, we wanted to answer some of the questions about how FERs are scored. So grab your favorite beverage, sit back, and read on as we share the process with you.

An often overlooked step in the process of analyzing results, data cleaning is vital to ensure the accuracy of your evaluation. After all, you put a lot of time and effort into developing your instrument, training your data collectors, and gathering a representative sample. You don't want all that hard work ruined by dirty data!

We all have our workplans, and in an ideal world, we would complete all activities by the assigned due date without incident. However, we are all painfully aware that we do not live in a perfect world, and oftentimes things do not go according to plan. What do we do then? In this article, we explore some real-life situations in which things did not go according to plan and how some evaluators have handled it.

While out on a walk after Thanksgiving, I was having a conversation with a friend. As we walked along, crunching the leaves and fallen acorns, we began talking about what we were thankful for. Our conversation touched on something subtle and perhaps overlooked; we talked about acknowledging and thanking those around us. 

Every quarter, evaluators have an opportunity to connect with other evaluators in the Tobacco Evaluator Alliance. At the last meeting, some requested additional help on FER writing, so we got together with Yaneth from the Hispanic Coordinating Center to quickly offer a FER Q/A session.  These are the main takeaways from that session and an invitation to join us for the next one.

Collaboration unites people, ideas, and surveys. Yes. You read that right. Surveys. Mono County’s Tobacco Education Program (TEP) has been working with their Local Oral Health Program to deliver a tobacco cessation survey to dental providers. Their collaboration is just one example of the many that already exist and are forming. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Lauren Kemmeter, Project Director of Mono County’s TEP.

To get to know more about their collaboration, I wanted to understand who they are first.

In April, I was invited to participate in the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Endgame Center for Organizing and Engagement’s Affinity call to share ideas about how evaluation can inform and support project decisions and actions. Or as Paul Knepprath, the Tobacco Endgame Center’s project director, put it: How to use evaluation to win campaigns.