Media Literacy May be Effective in Educating Teens About Smoking

Educating teenagers to see through pro-cigarette messages in the media may be effective at preventing youth smoking than just saying no, a recent study finds.

More kids changed their mind about the possibility of starting smoking after engaging in a media literacy course, compared to those kids who only participated in traditional anti-smoking classes. "Standard school-based-smoking-prevention programs are just not as successful as we would like," said Dr. Brian Primack.

Dr. Primack, lead study author and director of the Program for Research on Media and Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said clean air laws and large anti-smoking campaigns have led to an overall drop in smoking in the United States. "But when it comes down to youth educational programs, it just hasn't worked as well as we hoped." Dr. Primack and his colleagues recruited 796 ninth-grade students from three Pittsburgh high schools to either take a traditional anti-smoking class or the media literacy program.

Those involved in a traditional program deals a lot with resisting social influences, such as peers and parents who smoke. On the other hand, the media literacy program is intended to teach adolescents to analyze and evaluate the messages they're encountering in popular culture. "That's why people said if the media is so influential, maybe media literacy at least theoretically could be a good avenue for intervention." However, Dr. Primack noted that the two classes share common themes. "They're not completely 100 percent opposite."