Purpose: To compare public and policy maker support for three point-of-sale tobacco policies.
Design: Two cross-sectional surveys--one of the public from the New York Adult Tobacco Survey and one of policy makers from the Local Opinion Leader Survey; both collected and analyzed in 2011.
Setting: Tobacco control programs focus on educating the public and policy makers about tobacco control policy solutions.
Subjects: Six hundred seventy-six county-level legislators in New York's 62 counties and New York City's five boroughs (response rate: 59%); 7439 New York residents aged 18 or older. Landline response rates: 20.2% to 22%. Cell phone response rates: 9.2% to 11.1%.
Measures: Gender, age, smoking status, presence of a child aged 18 years or younger in the household, county of residence, and policy maker and public support for three potential policy solutions to point-of-sale tobacco marketing.
Analysis: t-tests to compare the demographic makeup for the two samples. Adjusted Wald tests to test for differences in policy support between samples.
Results: The public was significantly more supportive of point-of-sale policy solutions than were policy makers: cap on retailers (48.0% vs. 19.2%, respectively); ban on sales at pharmacies (49.1% vs. 38.8%); and ban on retailers near schools (53.3% vs. 42.5%).
Limitations: cross-sectional data, sociodemographic differences, and variations in item wording.
Conclusions: Tobacco control programs need to include information about implementation, enforcement, and potential effects on multiple constituencies (including businesses) in their efforts to educate policy makers about point-of-sale policy solutions.