Table 5.
Studies Addressing Research Question on Programming and Policy Efforts That Reduce Young Adult Smoking Initiation, Systematic Review of Studies on Smoking Initiation Among Young Adults in the United States and Canada, 1998-2010
| Study | Primary Result |
|---|---|
| Counter-industry marketing and denormalization campaign strategies | |
| Farrelly et al (30) | A longitudinal cohort study from 1997 to 2004 of adolescents aged 12 to 17 years at baseline found exposure to the Truth campaign may have been successful in preventing as many as 450,000 adolescents and young adults from initiating smoking between 2000 and 2004. |
| Richardson et al (31) | Results from 8 cross-sectional nationally representative telephone surveys of young adults aged 18 to 24 years between December 1999 and January 2004 found that awareness of the national Truth campaign was significantly associated with greater antismoking attitudes among young adults. |
| Hersey et al (32) | Compared to young adults in states without counter-industry media campaigns, young adults living in states with aggressive counter-industry media campaigns were more likely to have negative beliefs about tobacco industry practices, including: "Cigarette companies (CCs) lie" (odds ratio [OR] = 1.6); "CCs try to cover up all the bad things they've done" (OR = 1.6); "CCs target teens to replace smokers who die" (OR = 1.6); "CCs deny that cigarettes are addictive" (OR = 2.0); and "CCs deny cigarettes cause cancer and other harmful diseases" (OR = 1.7). Negative beliefs about CCs were strongly associated with negative industry attitudes, which in turn were associated with earlier stages of smoking progression.a |
| Smoke-free policies | |
| Wechsler et al (33) | Among students who were not regular smokers before age 19, current cigarette use was significantly lower for those who lived in smoke-free housing than for those that lived in housing that allowed smoking (10% vs 16.9%). |
| Taxation | |
| Zhang et al (34) | A longitudinal study of young adults found cigarette price change was significantly associated with smoking initiation. The greater the price reduction, the greater the likelihood of initiating smoking (OR = 1.15), after controlling for individual characteristics, tobacco-control policies, and unobserved variations between Canadian provinces. |
Smoking progression defined as moving from 1) closed to smoking (those who had not smoked cigarettes and did not intend to do so), 2) open to smoking (respondents who had not smoked cigarettes but indicated that they might smoke in the future), 3) prior experimenters (those who had tried cigarettes but who had not smoked during the past month), 4) early smokers (respondents who had smoked cigarettes at least once in the past 30 days but were not yet established smokers), and 5) established smokers (those who had smoked cigarettes on 20 of the past 30 days and who had smoked 100 or more cigarettes in their lifetime).