The Teenage Attitudes and Behavior Study (TABS) was conducted on a continuous basis from February 1999 through the end of 2007. During that time, TABS was a large-scale, comprehensive, ongoing telephone survey of adolescents aged 11 to 17 years old in the coterminous United States. TABS was sponsored by Philip Morris USA's Youth Smoking Prevention department and conducted by Research International USA, an external research firm.

The TABS survey collected information from youth respondents about a broad range of topic areas, including their participation in activities; attitudes about themselves; relationships with parents; and the tobacco-related attitudes and behaviors of themselves, their parents and their peers. The TABS survey was conducted daily via telephone, yielding approximately 20,000 completed interviews with youth each year with the permission of each respondent's parent or guardian. In total, approximately 180,000 adolescents were surveyed for the TABS study across nine years of interviewing.