Smoking trends in adolescence: report on a Greek school-based, peer-led intervention aimed at prevention

Abstract

This article presents a school-based, peer-led programme aiming at smoking prevention among Greek adolescents. The intervention was based on the social influence approach, and utilized 28 students' personal sensitization for the development of audio-visual material, which was presented to the remaining students of the two experimental schools (n = 440). The effectiveness of the intervention was assessed by means of experimental and control (n = 217) students' completion of a questionnaire prior to, immediately after and 3 months after the intervention. The Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (MANOVAR) showed declines in the experimental group's smoking behaviour and intention to smoke immediately after, but not 3 months after the intervention, and more lasting changes in this group's knowledge of addiction and anti-smoking attitude. These effects were not observed for the control group. Programme evaluation and the implementation of health education programmes in the Greek school curriculum are discussed in the light of these findings.