Association of Cigarette Smoking and Media Literacy about Smoking among Adolescents

Abstract

Purpose-To determine whether media literacy concerning tobacco use is independently associated with two clinically relevant outcome measures in adolescents: current smoking and susceptibility to smoking.Methods-We asked high school students aged 14-18 years to complete a survey that included a validated 18-item smoking media literacy (SML) scale, items assessing current smoking and susceptibility to future smoking, and covariates shown to be related to smoking. We used logistic regression to assess independent associations between the two outcome measures and SML.Results-Of the 1211 students who completed the survey, 19% reported current smoking. Controlling for all potential confounders of smoking, we found that an increase of one point (out of 10) in SML was independently associated with an odds ratio for smoking of .84 (95% confidence interval [CI] .71-.99). Compared with students below the median score on the SML scale, students above the median had an odds ratio for smoking of .57 (95% CI .37-.87). Of the students who were nonsmokers, 40% were classified as susceptible to future smoking. Controlling for all potential confounders of smoking, we found that an increase of one point (out of 10) was independently associated with and an odds ratio for smoking susceptibility of .68 (95% CI .58-. 79). Compared with students below the median SML, students above the median SML had an odds ratio for smoking susceptibility of .49 (95% CI .35-.68).Conclusions-In this sample of high school students, higher SML is independently associated with reduced current smoking and reduced susceptibility to future smoking. © 2006 Society for Adolescent Medicine. All rights reserved. [25][26][27], making media literacy attractive as an intervention. However, these studies focused on the outcomes such as student satisfaction, knowledge, and attitudes, and did not demonstrate that antismoking media literacy is associated with improvements in clinically relevant outcomes related to smoking. We therefore used a reliable, validated scale measuring the construct of smoking media literacy (SML) in youth [24] to determine the degree to which clinically relevant smoking-related outcomes are associated with SML scores in a large group of high school students. We hypothesized that higher media literacy scores would be associated with a decreased likelihood of current smoking and that, among current nonsmokers, those with higher media literacy would have a lower susceptibility to future smoking. Keywords Methods Participants and settingThe study population for our cross-sectional survey consisted of students attending a suburban public high school outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a total enrollment of 1690. The community served by this high school is primarily Caucasian and middle-income. Male and female students were eligible to participate if they were 14-18 years old and were available to take the survey on the regular school day in January 2005 when it was administered. On this date, 79 students were absent and 86 were unav...

The effects of risk-glorifying media exposure on risk-positive cognitions, emotions, and behaviors: A meta-analytic review.

“…The authors still found a substantial connection between exposure to risk-glorifying media content and risk taking (g ϭ .39), which is comparable in magnitude to the mean overall effect size of the present metaanalysis (g ϭ .43). Other researchers such as Distefan, Pierce, and Gilpin (2004); Choi et al (2002);and Primack, Gold, Land, and Fine (2006) also reported adjusted effects, which ranged from between g ϭ .29 and g ϭ .31 and are thus in the same effect size range as the overall, unadjusted effect size found in our metaanalysis. In addition, the present research contains many experiments (N ϭ 25; accounting for 23.81% of all effect sizes) in which a priori differences were naturally controlled by randomization.…”

Smoking-Related Attitudes and Knowledge Among Medical Students and Recent Graduates in Argentina: A Cross-Sectional Study

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Smoking motives in movies are important for understanding adolescent smoking: A preliminary investigation

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