Cognitive-Behavioral Prevention of Children's Smoking

Abstract

This study combined cognitive and behavioral methods to keep young people from smoking cigarettes. In small groups, two leaders gave sixth-grade females and males health information, skills for solving problems and making decisions, and training in persuasive communication. Youths took multimodal measures before and after delivery of prevention training and completed 6-month follow-up. Gains from pretest to posttest revealed that young people in a prevention training condition, compared with those in an untrained control condition, had more knowledge about cigarette smoking, had greater abilities to analyze problems, connect problems with outcomes, and anticipate consequences of decisions, and had improved nonverbal and verbal communication. Follow-up showed youths who participated in prevention training to have better attitudes toward nonsmoking, fewer intentions to smoke, more instances of refusing to smoke cigarettes, and less cigarette smoking than control youths.