The efficacy of a smoking prevention curriculum in fifth-grade children

Abstract

More than 3,000 young people begin smoking each day in the United States. The age at which children begin to smoke is on a continual d~cline, with an estimated 60% of smokers beginning by age 13 and 90% having begun by age 20. The younger the age of smoking initiation, the less likely it is they will ever quit. The prevention of smoking needs to begin during childhood because of the early exposure to cigarette use, and the addictive nature of nicotine. The primary purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the efficacy of a smoking prevention curriculum in fifth-grade children. The -efficacy of this curriculum as an intervention was assessed by measuring the child's intent to smoke by the end of their current school year. Two secondary purposes of this study were to determine (a) possible predictive variables of the child's intention to smoke and (b) the influence of the intervention on the child's ·attitudes, normative beliefs, and perceptions of refusal skills related to smoking. This study consisted of 361 fifth-grade children from public schools in the southeast.The smoking prevention curriculum used in this study was a 5-unit curriculum developed by the American Cancer Society to prevent smoking in children. It is a part of the "Do It Yourself-Making Healthy Choices"_curriculum. The I various internal factors addressed in this study were measured by an investigator-developed School-Age Smoking Questionnaire.· It also measured the child's intention to smoke. Parental attitudes toward smoking were measured by the Smoking Attitude Scale developed by Gordon and Haynes. Other variables were measured by an investigator-developed sociodemographic questionnaire. This study utilized the Solomon four-group design. The study was quasi-experimental in nature. Participating schools were randomly assigned to one of the four groups. Analysis of variance and ~-tests for paired samples were used to analyze the differences in data-from the four groups. Five research hypotheses were developed for this study. These were a·nalyzed using ANOVA and multi variate cor_relation statistics. Results indicated that the smoking program was an effective intervention to decrease the intention to smoke in fifth-grade children (~ = .000). The intervention was effective in changing children's attitudes towa~d smoking (~ = .000), but was not significantly effective in changing normative beliefs and refusal skills. Attitude and refusal skills resulted as the best over.all predictors of intention to smoke in children.