| Methods |
Country: Norway
Setting: health centres
RCT |
| Participants |
443 families with 1 or more smoking parent presenting with a child to a well baby check at 6 weeks or 2 or 4 years |
| Interventions |
Intervention: 5‐minute counselling from health visitor on harmful effects of parent smoking on children and how to prevent them (stop smoking indoors/in living rooms or quit completely). Three brochures distributed (harm of passive smoking, measures to prevent passive smoking, self‐help cessation manual) along with a list of smoking cessation courses
Control: given no information unless participants asked for it, until after the period of study. Physicians were asked to withhold their usual advice. Self‐completed questionnaires were administered at the visit and 1 month later. |
| Outcomes |
Parent behaviour by self‐report at baseline and at 1 month |
| Type of intervention |
Well‐child (child health check) |
| Notes |
Retention 363/443 (82%) |
| Risk of bias |
| Bias |
Authors' judgement |
Support for judgement |
| Random sequence generation (selection bias) |
Unclear risk |
"Randomly allocated"; method of sequence generation not specified |
| Allocation concealment (selection bias) |
Unclear risk |
Not specified |
| Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias)
All outcomes |
Low risk |
ITT analysis; exact numbers not provided: "The withdrawal was small and probably not intervention related because the proportion of drop‐outs was about the same in both groups" |
| Blinding of outcome assessment (detection bias)
All outcomes |
Low risk |
Self‐report only, no validation used; however no evidence of effect, so differential misreport judged to be unlikely |
| Other bias |
Unclear risk |
"A "contamination" of information may have taken place from the intervention group to the control group because parents from the two groups may have talked together during the study period." |
