Elsevier

Preventive Medicine

Volume 11, Issue 2, March 1982, Pages 199-211
Preventive Medicine

General article
The efficacy of a multicomponent approach to the prevention of cigarette smoking

https://doi.org/10.1016/0091-7435(82)90018-4Get rights and content

Abstract

The efficacy of a 12-session multicomponent peer leadership smoking prevention program was tested on 426 seventh graders. The program focused on the acquisition of basic life skills and the improvement of personal competence, with particular emphasis on coping with social influences to smoke. Experimental and control groups were compared in terms of self-reported smoking status and several knowledge and psychological variables hypothesized to be related to smoking onset. In addition, saliva thiocyanate (SCN) levels were analyzed in a subsample of students. A significant reduction in new smoking was seen in students in the experimental group, based on both the analysis of self-reported smoking status and SCN levels. There also were significant end-of-treatment differences between the experimental and control groups on three of the knowledge variables and two of the psychological variables. At 1-year follow-up, significantly fewer of the students in the experimental group had become regular (weekly) cigarette smokers than those in the control group. These results indicate the short-term effectiveness of a broad-spectrum smoking prevention program that may be applicable to several areas of health education.

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  • A review of research on cigarette smoking in Preventive Medicine in recognition of the journal's 50th anniversary

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    The mean RCR for the 23 articles meeting eligibility criteria was 3.63 (±0.87), which is at the 88th normalized percentile; 22 of these 23 articles (95.65%) had an RCR that exceeded the NIH median 1.0 and 50th normalized percentile, supporting greater than average influence for NIH-supported research in this field (Table 2). The higher impact prevention studies included highly innovative seminal studies by Botvin and colleagues combining education and life-skills training with elementary school students (Botvin et al., 1980; Botvin and Eng, 1982). Subsequent reports largely reflected innovations along the lines of integrating that approach with training on resisting psychological and social influences (Flay et al., 1995; Tell et al., 1984), use of mass media to increase reach (Flynn et al., 1997), involvement of parents and families (Curry et al., 2003), and extensions to older students (Gorini et al., 2014; Hiemstra et al., 2014).

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This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Interagency Council on Smoking and Health (CDC-200-78-D815).

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