strategies for deterrence of cigarette smoking in youth. Although the original study did not show experimental interventions to be superior to just monitoring smoking behavior periodically, it did establish the rationale and feasibility of several social psychological principles for an adolescent prevention program. Emphasis was on the short term consequences of smoking; films were used extensively to demonstrate typical pressures to smoke from peers, parents and media, and to depict role models resisting smoking pressures. Students were encouraged to develop counter arguments against smoking in order to strengthen themselves against future persuasion attempts. Evans has been especially interested in developing social modeling films that would provide a standard and easily transportable medium for the prevention message. Although the effectiveness of standard films used alone is not yet established (Johnson, 1982), the general approach to role model presentation employed by Evans has been used in other social psychological, from these other efforts, prevention research efforts of this type. A methodological refinement has been the use of saliva sample collection (for nicotine analysis) to augment the validity of self reports about smoking. Evans et al. (1977) found that persons were twice as likely to report smoking when self reports were preceded by saliva collection for analysis than when not.
McAlister and others (1980) of Stanford and Harvard have also used role models to teach smoking resistance skills. Their role models were live, rather than on film, and consisted of a team of five to seven students from a nearby high school recruited and trained to conduct six sessions in seventh grade classrooms. Skills training was active, employing role playing of resistance techniques. Although at the start of the sessions in the fall more persons in the treatment school (2%) than in the control school (.9%) said "yes" to the q...