Evaluating the Policy Process: County Tobacco-free Properties

Oregon’s Tobacco Prevention and Education Program grants funding to each county in Oregon to conduct local tobacco control efforts. These local tobacco programs have been working to encourage county governments to adopt tobacco-free properties policies. About one-quarter of counties now have tobacco-free properties policies for all government properties.

An evaluation of these policy change processes was conducted among the counties. The evaluation was designed as a Utilization-Focused Evaluation. The main users of the evaluation were the tobacco control staff working at the counties. In addition to collecting the data for this evaluation, county tobacco control staff helped design the data collection tool, analyses, and reporting formats.

A User Panel that included staff from six counties met with the evaluators at in-person meetings and by video-conference multiple times during the year-long project. Members of User Panel helped with training the broader group of staff from all counties on data collection and how to use the evaluation findings.

The input from the county tobacco control staff improved the quality of the evaluation project and was essential for ensuring that the findings were valuable and useful to these evaluation users. This presentation will describe how the evaluation was conducted in order to make the evaluation process as well as the findings most useful to the county tobacco control staff. In addition, we will describe the common characteristics among the counties that successfully adopted tobacco-free properties policies.