Health Education and Smoking Prevention

Smoking prevention has been espoused as a desirable alternative to cessation programs aimed at youth. This position is based on the arguments that: 1) more young people can be reached in prevention programs than in cessation programs, 2) preventing the onset of smoking is easier than eliciting and maintaining cessation, 3) smoking of even short duration may be harmful to some, and 4) even if programs only delay rather than truly prevent the onset of smoking, there will be substantial health benefits to the population for whom the delay has occurred.

Recently, a number of researchers have developed and tested adolescent smoking prevention programs (Botvin, 1980). Critical reviews of these recent prevention programs are Johnson (1982), a

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oking program classes were tested. Apparatus. The Smoking Pressure Questionnaire was based on the other measures which have been used in the evaluation of smoking programs for adults and children (An Evaluation Handbook for Health Education Programs in Smoking, 1983). Items were taken from several of the measures in order to test the particular issue under consideration, namely, overcoming pressures to smoke from peers and family. A copy of the questionnaire is produced in Appendix A. Fifteen items were included in the questionnaire and fieldtested for readability with 15 nonparticipating subjects. No problems were encountered in the reading or understanding of any of the items in the questionnaire. The first ten items were used to measure the subjects' knowledge of appropriate responses to peer pressures to smoke, while the last five items measure appropriate responses to parental modeling. The questionnaire was scored by tabulating the number of correct responses for each item, also shown in the Appendix. Procedures. Letters were mailed out to schools which met the initial criteria for inclusion in the study. Of these schools only those who showed an interest in being in the study were further evaluated for incl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3825
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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