School-based Smoking Prevention with Media Literacy: A Pilot Study

Abstract

School-based tobacco prevention programs have had limited success reducing smoking rates in the long term. Media literacy programs offer an innovative vehicle for delivery of potentially more efficacious anti-tobacco education. However, these programs have been neither widely implemented nor well evaluated. We conducted a pre-post evaluation of a cross-disciplinary tobacco media literacy program. The sample consisted of 204 students across six schools. Results indicated that students’ smoking-specific media literacy and general media literacy measures increased significantly over the course of the intervention.