Problems and prospects of applied research: The development of an adolescent smoking prevention program

This paper argues that applied research has the potential for making important theoretical contributions if efforts are made to explore and overcome inadequacies in existing social scientific theories by integrating, refining, and expanding these theories to achieve the necessary scope to solve the problem at hand. Ways in which these ends might be achieved are suggested through discussion of the procedures employed and the problems encountered in the development and assessment of Iowa's Program Against Smoking (I‐PAS), a theoretically‐based program to reduce adolescents' tobacco use.