A Study Of Smoking Intervention Among Junior High Schools In Hefei City

Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of a smoking intervention on the use of tobacco, knowledge and attitude about smoking among adolescents of junior high school, and explore the difference in efficacy of multi-intervention and once-intervention.Methods: As a group randomized controlled trial, we selected 15 high schools from Hefei city, which were approximate in community economy, size of students in grade one of junior high school and size ratio of teachers and students. After baseline investigation, we immediately carried out the intervention in once- and multi-intervention groups. The students in control group only received the questionnaire investigation, those in once-intervention group only received once intervention, and those in multi-intervention group received totally 3 interventions and the first one was the same in time and intervention measures as the once-intervention group. According to the progress of interventions for multi-intervention group, at the end of six months after each intervention, we carried out a questionnaire investigation for all groups.Results: We found the smoking rates of all groups were increasing. At the end of 1 and 1.5 years after intervention, the once-intervention group had significantly lower smoking rate than that of control group at the same visit. The smoking rate of multi-intervention group was lower than control group at the same visit after each intervention, and also lower than once-intervention group after the second(OR: 0.56; 95%CI: 0.32– 1.00) and third (OR: 0.48; 95%CI: 0.30– 0.78)intervenion. Comparing the smoking rate of each post-intervention visit with that of the immediate previous one, we found that the once-intervention group only at the end of half a year after intervention had no significant difference in smoking rate with the baseline, while the muli-intervention group's smoking rate of each post-intervenion was not significantly different with that of the immediate previous one. We also found that the knowledge scores of all groups were increasing, and the knowledge scores of the once-intervention were not significantly differcent with the control group, but after intervention, the once-intervention group had higher knowledge scores at each visit. As for the attitude about smoking, we found the attitude scores of all groups were decreasing, and the multi-intervention was more effective than the once-intervention on delaying the decreasing of attitude scores.Conclusions: From the results of a randomized controlled trial, we found that the efficacy of the intervention on controlling the smoking rate of junior high school students was significant, and also significant on increasing these adolescents'knowledge about smoking, but not on changing their attitude towards smoking. Meanwhile, we found that the multi-intervention was more effective on controlling junior high school students'smoking rate than the once-intervention, but not on increasing their knowledge about smoking. In addition, we found the multi-intervention was more effective than the once-intervention on delaying adolescents' attitude toward smoking becoming more negative, but this conclusion should be considered with caution.