TELEPHONE COUNSELING FOR SMOKING CESSATION AMONG TEENS

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Reduction of smoking prevalence in teens is one of the most significant public health issues in the United States. National surveys have consistently shown that many teen smokers would like to quit smoking but experience little long term success. Nevertheless, current research efforts directed at reducing smoking prevalence in teens have focused primarily on uptake prevention. Only a handful of studies have attempted to help those teens who are already smoking. Those efforts that have been directed at helping teens quit smoking have been hampered by difficulty i recruiting young smokers into traditional school-based or clinic-based cessation programs. This study intends to demonstrate that telephone counseling is a particularly conductive format for counseling teen smokers because of their natural affinity for phone conversation. This study will examine the effectiveness of telephone counseling for the teen smoker using a randomized design. A large sample (N-1, 460) of teen smokers who call the California Smokers' Helpline will be randomized into telephone counseling versus a control group. The control group will receive self- help materials and the counseling group will receive self-help materials and 7 counseling sessions, two session before they make a quit attempt and 5 sessions after the quit attempt. The 7 session counseling program will use a modified version of the same structured telephone counseling protocol that has been shown to be effective with adult smokers. A significant addition to the counseling protocol is a form of parental involvement operationalized as a specific parental behavior that is yoked to the teen's quit attempt. It is hypothesized that the teen smokers in the counseling group will be twice as likely to succeed in quitting smoking than those in the self-help control group (5% vs. 10%). SA sample of those who remain abstinent at 12 months will be verified through saliva cotinine.