NOV/DEC 2006
Volume 12 - No. 4
SRNT Newsletter
November/December 2006, Volume 12, Number 4
Featured Program
The ImpacTeen Project:
Assessing the Impact of Policy and
Environmental Influences on Youth Tobacco Use
ImpacTeen: A Policy Research Partnership for Healthier Youth Behavior is one component of the larger Bridging the Gap: Research Informing Policy and Practice for Healthy Youth Behavior program (BTG). BTG's other major component, the Youth, Education and Society project (YES), is based at the University of Michigan and is directed by Lloyd Johnston. Since 1997, BTG has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with related funding from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, and others.
BTG focuses on assessing the impact of policies, programs, and other environmental influences on a variety of youth behaviors. From the beginning, these behaviors included youth tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug use and related outcomes; in recent years, these have expanded to include physical activity, diet, and obesity-related outcomes. The program is a multi-disciplinary, multi-site collaborative one that considers influences on these behaviors at several levels, including the individual, school, community, state, and broader environment. The YES program focuses largely on the impact of school policies and programs, while the ImpacTeen component is focused more on community and state-level influences. The ImpacTeen tobacco team is led by Gary Giovino at the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions and involves numerous collaborators, including Melanie Wakefield, John Tauras, Sandy Slater, Sherry Emery, Lisa Powell, Cindy Tworek, and many more.
Over the past ten years, the ImpacTeen project's research has examined the impact of key state and local tobacco control policies on youth tobacco use. Among other results, we have:
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- demonstrated the effectiveness of higher cigarette taxes and prices in reducing teenage smoking prevalence and initiation (Tauras, et al., 2001; Powell and Chaloupka, 2005);
- shown that greater funding for state-level tobacco control programs lowers youth smoking (Tauras et al., 2004);
- found that increased exposure to state-sponsored, televised anti-smoking advertising strengthens anti-smoking norms and reduces youth smoking (Emery et al., 2005)
Findings from our research have been disseminated to a variety of audiences, including other researchers, public health practitioners, the advocacy community, and policy makers. In coming months, several new papers and products will result from ImpacTeen's tobacco-focused research.
The December issue of the American Journal of Public Health will include a study from the NCI-funded Youth Smoking and the Media project, led by Melanie Wakefield, that uses media market-level data on youth exposure to anti-smoking advertising from a variety of sources, matched to the 1999 through 2002 Monitoring the Future surveys of 8th, 10th and 12th grade students, to assess the impact of industry-sponsored ads on youth smoking-related beliefs and behavior. We find that the tobacco company sponsored ads targeting youth generally have no impact on these outcomes, with the exception of 8th graders for whom higher exposure to the ads is associated with stronger intentions to smoke in the future. With respect to the industry ads targeting parents, we find that greater exposure among 10th and 12th graders is associated with lower perceived harm from smoking, stronger approval of smoking, stronger intentions to smoke in the future, and increased smoking prevalence.
In early 2007, the ImpacTeen tobacco chartbook Cigarette Smoking Prevalence and Policies in the 50 States: An Era of Change will be released. This chartbook documents the strengthening of state tobacco control policies over the past decade, the declines in cigarette smoking among youth and adults caused by these policies, and a variety of other state-level tobacco-related information. State policies emphasized include cigarette taxes, restrictions on smoking, laws targeting underage smoking (youth access and purchase, possession and use laws), Medicaid coverage for cessation, and funding for comprehensive state tobacco control programs. Other information highlighted includes trends in youth and adult smoking and cessation, the health and economic impact of smoking on states, the extent of smoke free homes and workplaces, and the frequency of physician brief advice to quit smoking. The data contained in the chartbook and much more will be released on the ImpacTeen web site (http://www.impacteen.org/tobaccodata.htm ) and will be a valuable resource for researchers.
Several papers led by Sandy Slater will emerge in subsequent months that take advantage of the unique community-level data on tobacco product marketing at the point-of-sale (including measures of advertising, promotion, pricing, and placement) collected by the ImpacTeen project to examine the impact of these marketing efforts on youth smoking prevalence, consumption, and uptake. Cindy Tworek is leading others that focus on the impact of state policies targeting youth purchase, possession, and/or use of tobacco products. Others assess the impact of community and school cessation programs for youth and of state tobacco control policies on youth cessation-related outcomes. Keep an eye on the ImpacTeen web site — www.impacteen.org — for these and more.
Emer, S.L., Wakefield, M.A., Terry-McElrath, Y., Saffer, H., Szczypka, G., O'Malley, P.M., Johnston, L.D., Chaloupka, F.J., & Flay, B. (2005). Televised state-sponsored anti-tobacco advertising and youth smoking beliefs and behavior in the United States, 1999-2000. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 159, 639-645.
Powell, L.M., & Chaloupka, F.J. (2005). Parents, public policy, and youth smoking, Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, 24, 93-112.
Tauras, J.A., O'Malley, P.M., & Johnston, L.D. (2001). Effects of Price and Access Laws on Teenage Smoking Initiation: A National Longitudinal Analysis. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 8331.
Tauras, J.A., Chaloupka, F.J., Farrelly, M.C., Giovino, G.A., Wakefield, M.A., Johnston, L.D., O'Malley, P.M., Kloska, D., & Pechacek, T.F. (2005). State tobacco control spending and youth smoking. American Journal of Public Health, 95, 338-344.
Wakefield, M.A., Terry-McElrath, Y., Emery, S., Saffer, H., Chaloupka, F.J., Szczypka, G., Flay, B., O'Malley, P.M., & Johnston, L.D. (in press). Effect of televised, tobacco company-funded smoking prevention advertising on youth smoking-related beliefs, intentions, and behavior. American Journal of Public Health.