The ITC Policy Evaluation Project started its first project, the ITC Four-Country Project in 2002, to measure the psychosocial and behavioural factors of smoking in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The ITC team is currently undergoing a seventh wave of data collection. The other ITC countries joined the project at different times after the Four-Country project began, and therefore are in different waves of data collection.

A longitudinal cohort survey is simply a survey that measures the same variables across different populations, or countries in the case of ITC, and retains participants from year-to-year to monitor change in overall attitudes, knowledge, or behaviour within the population over time.

ITC Survey Questionnaires are available here.

Interviewing Methods

The original ITC Surveys were conducted using telephone interviewing, and this technique continues to be used in the new countries that have been added to the ITC Project.

With the introduction of ITC-Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Thailand), a new face-to-face interview was conducted with respondents.  To date, over 7,500 smokers, non-smokers, and youth have participated in the ITC-SEA project. 

Now, most of the ITC countries, use telephone interviewing, although some countries such as Malaysia and China use a mixture of telephone and face-to-face interviewing.

For a more detailed account on how the samples were obtained, please consult Technical Reports in the relevant Projects by Country folder.