Awareness of tobacco control policies and anti-tobacco attitudes and behaviors among school personnel

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Adolescent smoking is a serious public health concern, and the role of personnel in reducing students’tobacco use has been proven. Anti-tobacco policies are strong factors for tobacco control but most are newly implemented in China. This study aimed to examine the awareness of anti-tobacco policies among school personnel in a southern city of China, and assess its influence on personnel’s anti-tobacco attitudes and behaviors towards students. METHODS An online cross-sectional study was conducted between September 2017 and January 2018 in schools of Shanghai, China. A total of 3194 subjects from 33 schools were selected by a two-stage stratified cluster randomized sampling design. Prevalence of anti-tobacco policy awareness is presented. Crude (ORs) and adjusted odds ratios (AORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated to assess the association between policy awareness and anti-tobacco attitudes or behaviors. RESULTS In all, 22.4% of surveyed participants knew four or five polices presented in the survey and 13.0% of personnel knew none of these policies. Most of the participants fully support prohibiting indoor (94.6%) and outdoor (86.3%) smoking in public places, bans on tobacco advertising (90.9%), and printing warning pictures on cigarette boxes (89.5%). Less than half of the personnel had taken action to stop students from smoking (45.7%), encourage students to quit smoking (42.4%) or participated in relevant educational activities held by schools (37.4%) in the previous year. The school personnel’s anti-tobacco attitudes (AOR=1.28; 95% CI: 1.21–1.36) and behaviors (AOR=1.10; 95% CI: 1.03–1.17) were strengthened with increasing level of policy awareness. CONCLUSIONS The involvement of school personnel can be an important part of intervention to improve anti-tobacco campaigns on campus. The study calls for the implementation of projects or activities to improve anti-tobacco policy awareness in the school environment as part of school tobacco control strategy.

Using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and e-health literacy(e-HL) to investigate the tobacco control intentions and behaviors of non-smoking college students in China: a cross-sectional investigation

“…However, China does not have a comprehensive national smoke-free law, so Chinese schools got a late start in building smoke-free campuses [ 14 ]. Most anti-tobacco policies are newly implemented in China, which may contribute to the poor tobacco control of college students today [ 15 ]. In terms of smoke-free families, as the largest and most developed metropolis in Chinese Mainland, Shanghai's smoke-free family policy has little effect [ 16 ].…”