Smoking in Norwegian Movies: Trends in Frequency 1945-2004 - Saebo of Norway presented his preliminary findings on smoking scenes from 196 Norwegian movies (69% of the final sample). Especially interesting were early findings from a comparison of smoking in films versus the real world, where prevalence of smoking in the film world was higher than “real life” between 1955 to 1975, but was lower from 1975 onwards.
It was his belief that smoking in films actually marginalized smoking, creating anti-heroes. Someone wondered about the market share of Norwegian films in Norway, since he was looking only at Norwegian films. Saebo replied that Norwegian movies compete well with US blockbusters so they do have a huge market share. Another question was, since he believed that the films were marginalizing smoking and creating anti-heroes, whether there is evidence of an inverse relationship between exposure to Norwegian films and uptake or prevalence of smoking in children. Saebo replied that this is not yet addressed in his prelim results.
HELP Anti-Tobacco Campaign 2005-2006. This campaign used mass media TV spots, web campaigns, etc. target age group was 15-34, and worked in 22 EU languages. The presenter found that one of the main challenges was to have a message that would work across all EU countries. For example, they partnered up with MTV in 2006 on “Smoking, where do you stand?” where youth gave opinions on tobacco use. A question was whether the project affected actual behavior, not just behavior INTENTION, and the reply was no, because this was not easy to measure. It was then argued that of course there are ways to measure this and isn’t behavior modification the raison d’etre of such actions, but there was not enough time to pursue this discussion. I felt that this was really a shame because how can such an intensive project for such an important target group and with this amount of funding provide only results on intention??!!! Find more about this project here.
The Internet-Based Smoking Prevention Programme of Feelok (“feel OK”) - presented by Dr Oliver Padilina on an internet-based intervention in the school setting. This project was launched in 2001, and has had more than 1,300,000 visits, and 9 scientific studies. A general comment was that there are not enough evaluations on internet programmes. And I might add here isn’t this true of all public health prevention programmes?
Computer-Tailored Smoking Prevention and Cessation Intervention for Adols – The presentation was on prelim results on a doctoral thesis in-progress “Smoke Alert” , at Maastricht by Ms. F. Dijk. The research was to see how effective are computer-tailored (based on personalized info) information on smoking adolescents. The setting is also school-based, for better control and lower drop-out rates. Prelim conclusion was that the internet can be used successfully against uptake and for cessation, especially for cessation. However, there seems to be no effect on intention.
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