Countywide : Youngsters React to Anti-Smoking Ads

Anti-smoking ads showing cigarettes as “uncool” and a “turn-off” reinforce the lessons taught in school that smoking is unhealthy, according to a study by professors from UC Irvine and the University of Florida.

The one-year study of 304 seventh-graders in Orange County and Los Angeles concluded that exposure to anti-smoking ads helped the students think of smoking as immature and unglamorous.

“We found that with the seventh-graders, they universally held negative beliefs about smoking and health,” said Connie Pechmann, assistant professor at UCI’s Graduate School of Management. “They knew it was unhealthy, unwise, unsafe. . . . Health education has been very effective.

“But what the ads did,” she said, is “help create the impression that smoking is immature, uncool and not sexy.”

Pechmann’s partner in the study was Srinivasan Ratneshwar, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Florida.

“The main issue is, are the anti-smoking ads needed, given health education classes?” Pechmann said. “The idea was that kids who smoke have a positive perception of smokers, and kids prone to resist smoking have negative perceptions. We did the study to find out how advertisements affect those perceptions.”

In the test, students were first shown a magazine with either cigarette ads, anti-smoking ads or neither. Then they were asked to evaluate a teen-ager based on a written description. Half were told the teen-ager smoked.

Results showed that the youths who had seen the anti-smoking ads, which included a girl turning away from her boyfriend’s bad breath, judged the “smoker” lower on common sense, appeal, maturity and glamour than those who had seen no ads at all, Pechmann said.

Those who had seen cigarette ads tended to have more positive attitudes toward the “smoker,” but did judge the smoker lower on maturity, just as the anti-smoking ad group did.

The professors have received additional funding from the UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program to do more research on youngsters who are more vulnerable to peer pressure to smoke.

Youngsters in the current study were already resistant to smoking, Pechmann said: “When you take kids that are pro-smoking, will anti-smoking ads work for them?”

She said the new study would make a stronger attempt to specifically choose youths who are vulnerable to smoking.