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Foundation grant funds broadcasts and outreach on smoking prevention By Robert M. Butler
“It is very important for our programming to focus on youth, because nearly nine out of 10 current adult smokers started their smoking habit before 19 years of age.” —Dr. Marilyn Corbin Assistant Director Cooperative Extension Tobacco use in Pennsylvania: 23 percent of adults over the age of 18 smoke cigarettes. 35 percent of high school students use tobacco. More than 23,000 deaths each year are linked to tobacco use.	Thanks to an $8,000 grant provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation last fall, Penn State Public Broadcasting developed a series of on-air programs and outreach efforts focused on youth smoking cessation and prevention strategies in Pennsylvania.   The foundation made grants to 10 public television stations in 10 states to address local tobacco-related issues. The various broadcasts and outreach projects proposed were built around Search for a Safe Cigarette, the Oct. 2, 2001, season premier of the popular PBS series NOVA.   Penn State Public Broadcasting’s proposal to the foundation’s Safe Cigarette Community Engagement Initiative outlined several outreach projects: WPSX-TV’s daily public affairs talk show, Take Note, devoted its regular program schedule during the week of Oct. 1 to interviews with University representatives and community groups on tobacco issues. On the evening of Oct. 4, Take Note Live hosted an hour-long call-in program focused on methods to prevent kids from smoking and to help current tobacco users to quit. The call-in show was simulcast on WPSX-TV, WPSU-FM and the Web sites of both stations. During the fall, four student teams from a middle school, a charter school and the high school in State College, Pa., designed and produced 30-second TV spots intended to guide young people in avoiding tobacco use. Adelphia Communications of Coudersport, Pa., the fifth largest cable television provider in the United States, distributed the students’ public service announcements to managers in its various cable systems for use in local areas. WPSX-TV produced a half-hour documentary that followed the student teams as they wrestled with concept, message and production for the public service announcements. The documentary was broadcast on WPSX-TV in January. Using the NOVA program, Take Note interviews and student productions, Penn State Cooperative Extension agents are developing community presentations to extend the smoking cessation effort across the entire Commonwealth.   Praising the collaborative nature of this effort, Tracy Vosburgh, director of programming and production for Penn State Public Broadcasting, said, “Safe Cigarette has been a great opportunity to capitalize on the resources of the University, including the research base, public broadcasting and radio and the Cooperative Extension network, to address the important issue of youth smoking. This has been a very successful venture, and its effects will be felt in Pennsylvania for a long time to come.”   Dr. Theodore R. Alter, associate vice president for outreach, director of Cooperative Extension and associate dean in the College of Agricultural Sciences, said, “Penn State Cooperative Extension through its grassroots presence across Pennsylvania is an extraordinarily effective means of delivering smoking cessation and prevention information and education to young people and adults in their local schools, organizations and communities.”   “It is very important for our programming to focus on youth, because nearly nine out of 10 current adult smokers started their smoking habit before 19 years of age,” Dr. Marilyn Corbin, assistant director of Penn State Cooperative Extension and state program leader for children, youth and families, said. “Considerable research shows that very few people in the United States start to smoke or become regular smokers after their teen years.”   Drs. Michael Hecht and Michelle Miller-Day from the Department of Speech Communication in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State led the student teams producing the anti-smoking public service announcements. Hecht, professor and department head, and Miller-Day, assistant professor, modeled this project on the REAL (Refuse, Explain, Avoid and Leave) drug prevention program they developed at Arizona State University.   Miller-Day said the goal in having students create public service announcements is to identify the specific ways in which young people resist tobacco use and to communicate those methods effectively.   “Over the past decade, there has been a decisive shift in prevention from behavioral skills training to peer involvement in modeling and peer messages supporting conservative tobacco use norms,” Miller-Day said. “However, invoking conservative norms are fairly useless if the social norms do not accurately reflect the teen’s world — the norms for tobacco or other drug use in Phoenix or Memphis may be very different than the norms for use in State College, Pa. Moreover, invoking norms of resistance are incomplete without providing requisite communication skills to provide resistance to offers of tobacco or other substances.”   According to Hecht, the Arizona project is one of the few to reduce alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use among middle school students.   “For messages to effectively reach adolescents, they must capture their attention, avoid moralizing and fear messages and create identification,” Hecht said. “Adolescents identify with our messages, because we use their own stories about drugs and drug resistance, and we use other adolescents to produce these messages. Our theme is ‘from kids through kids to kids.’”   Corbin added, “Community education and intervention with a variety of components influence both individual behavior and community norms and practices related to teen tobacco use. School-based programs and community interventions involving students, parents, community organizations and mass media seem to make a bigger impact over time when they are coordinated together rather than as individual and separate interventions.”   The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Princeton, N.J., is the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care. It concentrates its grant-making in four goal areas: to assure that all Americans have access to basic health care at a reasonable cost, to improve care and support for people with chronic health conditions, to promote healthy communities and lifestyles, and to reduce the personal, social and economic harm caused by substance abuse.   “We saw the NOVA broadcast as an opportunity to increase community awareness and innovative local programming about the dangers of tobacco,” Joe Marx, senior communications officer at Robert Wood Johnson, said. “A partnership between community public television and local health organizations can open a rich dialogue and inform people about tobacco as a health problem right where they live.”   Community partners in this long-range project include the Northern Appalachia Leadership Initiative on Cancer, Statewide Coalition for a Tobacco Free Pennsylvania, State College Area Students Against Tobacco, Indiana County Tobacco Free Committee and Adelphia Communications. University partners include the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Penn State Cooperative Extension and the colleges of Health and Human Development, Agricultural Sciences and the Liberal Arts.