Modeling tobacco use behaviors and tobacco control policies of Turkey

The rapid growth of the technology and the convenience provided by the technological products/services have connected people, firms, countries, systems and etc. to each other more than before. Increase in the interrelations has inevitably affected the way most of the systems work and caused dynamic complexity. As the complex systems have continuously surrounded the lives, understanding and analyzing the structure of these systems has become a challenging process. Traditional methods have been inadequate to handle this dynamic complexity. As the result, developing new methods has become a growing need for researchers/modelers to understand complex behaviors emerging in the systems. Thereby, the main objective of this thesis is proposing a novel hybrid simulation model to better understand tobacco use behaviors of individuals. The model is developed by embedding the concept of the multi-stage learning based fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) into the agent based model (ABM) in order to benefit from advantageous of each methodology. The ABM is basically used for representing the individual level behaviors while the FCM is used as a decision support mechanism of individuals. In order to represent the current tobacco use status of Turkey, socio-demographic characteristics of individuals, tobacco control policies, and social network effects are examined. In addition, scenario analyses are performed to analyze the potential effects of plain package policy and COVID19 pandemic. The findings of this thesis indicate that the hybrid usage of the ABM and the multi stage learning based FCM help us to observe how individual level behaviors and system state changed under the effects of casual relationships among the critical factors. The thesis also presents how the proposed model can be used for imitating a real complex and dynamic problem such as tobacco use and control. Lastly, the findings of the scenario analyses point out critical demographic groups for future policy making process.