Core 1
Core Director: Chih-Ping Chou
The research projects at the center focus on the relationships between smoking behaviors and associated genetic heritability, psychological phenotypes, and socio-cultural environmental factors. In addition to assessing smoking behaviors in the United States, all three projects will make assessments in China. The Measurement Core provides a structure to integrate, support, and supplement these activities and to facilitate collaboration among researchers in the center’s projects.
Major assessments included in the center are assessments of tobacco and alcohol phenotypes, psychological dispositions, and environmental risk factors. The Measurement Core participates in an iterative process with the center investigators to refine and identify appropriate measures relevant to their studies. On a specific level, the Measurement Core:
- Conducts literature searches to identify existing measures, monitors the research literature to stay current with new published measures, and consults with PR TTAURC projects on developing, pilot testing and validating new measures when no appropriate measure exists at the first year of the Research Projects, and provides necessary consultation on measures for each individual project in the following years of research;
- Translates measures into Chinese;
- Assesses reliability and validity of measures in collaboration with the Statistics Core;
- Evaluates the cross-cultural equivalence of measures with assistance from the Statistics Core;
- Produces questionnaires, survey instruments, and evaluation forms as needed by the projects;
- Adds validated scales to the web-based measures bank;
- Evaluates quality of data collection procedures in China; and
- Trains students and staff on measurement issues.