The effectiveness of narrative versus informational smoking education on smoking beliefs, attitudes and intentions of low-educated adolescents.

ATTITUDE (Psychology); HEALTH attitudes; HEALTH education; INTENTION; QUESTIONNAIRES; RISK perception; SMOKING; NARRATIVES; EDUCATIONAL attainment; REPEATED measures design

Objective:This study tests the effectiveness of narrative versus informational smoking education on smoking beliefs, attitudes and intentions of low-educated adolescents. Design:A field experiment with three waves of data collection was conducted. Participants (N = 256) were students who attend lower secondary education. At the first and third waves, they completed a questionnaire. At the second wave, 50.8% of the participants read a smoking education booklet in narrative form and 49.2% read a booklet in informational form. After reading, all participants also completed a questionnaire at wave 2. Main outcome measures:Beliefs about negative consequences of smoking, attitudes towards smoking and intentions to smoke were measured. Results:Repeated measures analyses with time as a within-subjects factor and condition as a between-subjects factor showed that beliefs about smoking were more negative at Wave 2 compared to Wave 1, irrespective of condition. However, attitudes towards smoking were more positive at Wave 3 compared to Wave 1 when participants had read the narrative version. Conclusion:These results show that narrative smoking education is not more effective than informational smoking education for low-educated adolescents and can even have an unintended effect for this target group by making attitudes towards smoking more positive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]