EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION GUIDED BY THE THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR FOR SMOKING PREVENTION IN MALE ADOLESCENTS

• Dr. Tarek S. Minhori

  Department of Community Health Education, East Delta Medical University, Ismailia, Egypt

  Author

• Dr. Amariah L. Nyambe

  Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Lusaka Institute of Public Health, Lusaka, Zambia

  Author

• Dr. Jean-Paul M. Revigny

  School of Adolescent Health and Development, Université de l’Équité Publique, Dakar, Senegal

  Author

Background: Smoking among teenagers is a huge challenge worldwide. It leads to serious health problems, early deaths, and costs a lot of money. To truly make a difference, we need to understand what drives young people to smoke and how we can help them choose a healthier path. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) gives us a great roadmap for creating effective programs.

Objective: This study set out to see if an educational program, built on the ideas of the Theory of Planned Behavior, could help prevent male high school students from starting to smoke.

Methods: We used a study design that looked at students before and after our program. We involved 200 male students, splitting them into two groups of 100 each – one group received the program, and the other didn't. They came from two public high schools in a specific city. Our program involved eight weekly sessions, each about an hour long. These sessions were carefully designed to tackle the key areas of the TPB: how students felt about smoking, what they thought their friends and family expected, and how much control they felt they had over their own choices. We gathered information from students through questionnaires at the beginning and right after the eight-week program. To understand our findings, we used standard statistical tools to compare the groups and see how things changed over time.

Results: When we started, both groups of students were pretty similar in terms of their backgrounds and how they felt about smoking. But after our program, the students who participated showed big improvements compared to the control group. They developed much stronger negative feelings about smoking (mean change: +0.85±0.20, p<0.001), felt more strongly that their friends and family didn't want them to smoke (mean change: +0.70±0.15, p<0.001), and felt much more confident in their ability to resist smoking (mean change: +0.60±0.10, p<0.001). Because of these shifts, their intention to smoke dropped significantly (mean change: −0.90±0.25, p<0.001). What's more, far fewer students in our program group started smoking (2%) compared to the group that didn't get the program (8%) (p=0.028).

Conclusion: Our educational program, carefully designed using the Theory of Planned Behavior, proved to be very effective. It helped improve the psychological factors that lead to healthy choices and significantly reduced both the desire to smoke and the actual number of male adolescents who started smoking. These findings strongly suggest that schools should seriously consider adding well-thought-out, theory-based health education programs to their regular lessons. It's a vital step in helping our young people avoid the dangers of smoking.

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