State Legislators’ Beliefs About Legislation That Restricts Youth Access to Tobacco Products

Abstract

Better understanding of the cognitive framework for decision making among legislators is important for advocacy of health-promoting legislation. In 1994, the authors surveyed state legislators from North Carolina, Texas, and Vermont concerning their beliefs and intentions related to voting for a hypothetical measure to enforce legislation preventing the sale of tobacco to minors, using scales based on the theory of planned behavior. Attitude (importance), subjective norm (whether most people important to you would say you should or should not vote for the law), perceived behavioral control (ability to cast one's vote for the law), and home state were independently and significantly related to intention to vote for the law's enforcement. The results, including descriptive data concerning individual beliefs, suggest specific public health strategies to increase legislative support for passing legislation to restrict youth tobacco sales and, more generally, a framework for studying policy making and advocacy.

Legislator Voting and Behavioral Science Theory: A Systematic Review

“…Twenty-one studies met all of our inclusion criteria (Table 1). Although the majority of the papers focused on tobacco control (n=13), [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]17,18,[20][21][22] there were other topics covered: abortion/reproductive rights (n=3), 25,26,28 injury prevention (n=2), 19,24 and state lotteries (n=1). 16 In 2 papers, 23,27 multiple topics were covered.…”

“…Seven papers examined legislator support toward a policy; 8-12,19,21 5 examined legislator intention to vote; [13][14][15]17,18 and 11 papers examined actual votes. 13,16,19,20,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28] Six papers were explicitly grounded in one or more behavioral science theories, 8,9,[13][14][15]18 with 4 of those papers using the theory of planned behavior (TPB), 13-15,18 one paper using the related integrated theoretical model (ITM), 8 and 2 papers using diffusion of innovations theory (DIT). 8,9 The remaining papers were not explicitly grounded in any behavioral science theory, although one paper made general reference to sociological theory.…”

“…The group went on to publish papers examining factors associated with state legislators' intention to vote for cigarette tax increases and intention to support restrictions to youth access to tobacco products. 14,18 The fourth paper grounded in TPB was an unpublished doctoral thesis by Franklin from the University of Illinois at Springfield. 15 It concluded that legislators' atti- tude toward spending Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement money on healthrelated issues was the best predictor of intention to do so.…”

“…However, Gottleib et al did find that 2 dimensions of perceived behavioral control --a legislator's perception of whether legislation would advance out of committee so that he or she could cast a vote and a legislator's perception of whether his or her vote could help the legislation pass --predicted intention to support legislation aimed at restricting youth access to tobacco. 18 This suggests that it may be important for advocates to demonstrate to legislators that they will have a chance to vote on the policy in question and that the legislation has a reasonable chance of passing.…”

Researching State Tobacco Policymaking: Issues, Data Sources, and Methods

“…Another robust area of research has been in state youth access enforcement policies (Alciati et al 1998;Andersen, Begay, and Lawson 2003;Bal et al 2001;Chriqui et al 2002a;Cummings et al 2002;DiFranza and Dussault 2005;Givel and Glantz 2004-5;Gottlieb et al 2003;Landman, Ling, and Glantz 2002;Thomson et al 2004b), but these studies' findings are sharply divided as to the efficacy of such programs. Some researchers suggest that youth access enforcement programs have been quite effective in reducing youth tobacco use (DiFranza and Dussault 2005), while others argue the opposite (Fichtenberg and Glantz 2002).…”