A smoking prevention intervention in high school students

What is it about?

Researchers at the Society of Junior Doctors, in Greece, worked with the University of Crete and the Center for Global Tobacco Control at Harvard University to design an algorithm for an educational intervention for smoking prevention in high school students. The pilot study showed that following a high school interactive lecture on smoking, 32 students posted tobacco-related message on their Walls on Facebook that reached the cumulative audience of their 20,092 Friends.

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Why is it important?

Tobacco use is in certain settings still of epidemic proportions and one of the most serious public health issues. There is surprisingly little research on the potential use or value of popular social media for health promotion purposes on tobacco prevention, especially among adolescents, who tend to be significantly influenced by their peers. This paper describes the implementation of an educational intervention for tobacco prevention in high school students. We describe the design of a six-step intervention to use social media as means of health promotion with sharing of smoking-related take-home message that can spread virally to a large number of adolescents through Facebook. The intervention gives insight into a novel way of providing health education to youth that can be applied to other health behaviors through using social media and online networks.

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