Original articleDo adolescents appreciate the risks of smoking? Evidence from a national survey
Section snippets
Do young people overestimate the risk of lung cancer?
One way to reconcile these conflicting bodies of research would be to conclude that even if adolescents overestimate the health risks of smoking, they still discount the likelihood that they will personally experience them 13, 14, 16. However, Viscusi argued that measures of perceived objective risk better assess people’s appreciation of risk than the subjective ratings of personal risk often used by health researchers [17]. From this perspective, adolescents are more than adequately informed
Methods
After obtaining approval of the protocol by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pennsylvania, interviewers from Princeton Research Associates used random-digit telephone dialing procedures to identify over 13,000 households in the continental United States from May 27 through July 13, 1999. Approximately two-thirds (67.5%) of these households were successfully contacted; of these, 76.2% provided screening information to identify a person aged 14–22 years. Approximately 8.5% of
Results
Demographic characteristics of smokers and nonsmokers in the weighted sample are shown in Table 1. Controlling for all characteristics, smokers tended to be older [odds ratio (OR) = 1.37, p < .001] and less well-educated (OR = 0.69, p = .01), and were less likely to be ethnically black than nonsmokers (OR = 0.42, p = .01). Smokers were also less likely to reside in the western region of the country than nonsmokers (OR = 0.52, p = .02).
Discussion
The results help to clarify the apparent contradiction between Viscusi’s conclusion that perceptions of lung cancer risk attributed to smoking are grossly overestimated and the results obtained by health researchers who find that smokers are optimistic about the personal risks of smoking. First, the results showed that when young people’s lung cancer estimates were adjusted to match more closely the model used by epidemiologists, their estimates of mortality were more in line with current
Acknowledgements
The survey reported here was funded by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The advice and suggestions of Dr. Loretta Jemmott, Dr. Suzanne Fegley, Dr. Martin Fishbein, Chris Adasiewicz, and Dr. Mary McIntosh are gratefully acknowledged.
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