Breaking through to youth

Once people become addicted to nicotine, quitting tobacco use is very difficult. In general, smoking prevention and cessation efforts have resulted in only modest success in reducing youth tobacco-use rates. The Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation and other funding organizations are devoting significant resources to a wide range of mass media, community and school-based programs to discourage youth tobacco use. The VYTP, through its Youth Tobacco Evaluation Project, is applying scientific methods to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs, and Virginia Commonwealth University researchers are working with VTSF grantees to study the impact of more than 100 ongoing programs. Finding the answers to the following questions will help make anti-tobacco campaigns in Virginia more reliable:

• Which anti-tobacco programs work and which are relatively ineffective?

• Can messages and educational materials targeted to specific age groups or    to particular ethnic, gender and regional populations produce improved    results?

• Are certain program-provider organizations more effective than others in    producing measurable reductions in youth tobacco use?