ABSTRACT
When cigarette smoking prevention programs are offered to students in grades 6 to 8, there is consistent evidence of reductions in smoking initiation that persist into the early high school grades (G. J. Botvin, Baker, Dusenbury, & E. M. Botvin, 1990; Elder et al., 1993; Glynn, 1989). These effects, however, are usually eroded by the end of high school (Ellickson, Bell, & McGuigan, 1993; Flay, 1985; Flay et al., 1989; Murray et al., 1988). More promising long-term results have been obtained when school smoking prevention programs were combined with other channels of influence on young people (Perry, Kelder, Murray, & Klepp, 1992; Vartiainen, Fallonen, McAlister, & Puska, 1990). This study combined school-based smoking prevention with mass media messages created through an intensive program development process (Worden et al., 1988), which targeted subgroups by developmental level, gender, and risk for smoking adoption in both program design and implementation.
