The Rutgers Omnibus Study: Protocol for a quarterly web-based survey to promote rapid tobacco research (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Rapid and flexible data collection efforts are necessary for effective monitoring and research on tobacco and nicotine product use in a constantly evolving marketplace. OBJECTIVE To document the first two years of the Rutgers Omnibus Study. METHODS Launched in February 2022 and fielded quarterly thereafter, we survey convenience samples of 2000 to 3000 US adults ages 18 to 45 years recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The questionnaire includes core and rotating modules and is designed to take approximately 10 minutes to complete via Qualtrics. Fielding duration is approximately 10 days per wave. Each wave includes both unique and repeating participants, and responses can be linked across waves by an anonymous ID. RESULTS Sample sizes range from 2,082 (Wave 8) to 2,989 (Wave 1), and the 8-wave longitudinal dataset includes 10,334 participants, of whom 2,477 have three or more data points. Key demographics are consistent across waves and similar to that of the general population, while tobacco product trial and past-30-day use is generally higher. CONCLUSIONS The Rutgers Omnibus Study is a quarterly survey that is effective for rapidly assessing the use of emerging tobacco and nicotine products and can also be leveraged to conduct survey experiments, generate pilot data, and address both cross-sectional and longitudinal research questions.