Southern Center for Communication, Health & Poverty

From focus groups, we are learning that many teens say they smoke to reduce stress or smoke when they feel bad. However, after reviewing 500 anti-smoking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) created specifically for teens, we found that these messages did not address stress reduction or smoking to relieve bad feelings. These observations suggest that when creating anti-smoking PSAs for low-income adolescents in the South, issues such as smoking for stress reduction and smoking to relieve bad feelings should be incorporated into anti-smoking PSAs.

These observations came from two phases of the Youth and Smoking study. In Phase I, focus groups were conducted to understand how teens made decisions about smoking. In Phase II, the 500 PSAs were qualitatively analyzed for content and style. Both projects are part of the larger Youth and Smoking study intended to understand how low-income adolescents in the South make decisions regarding smoking behavior and how they perceive anti-smoking PSAs. Click here for more information concerning the Youth and Smoking study.