Study
Sussman, Dent, and colleagues (1993) used a five-group, randomized, experimental block design. Forty-eight schools from 27 Southern California school districts were randomly assigned within blocks defined by region (urban, rural), school type (middle school with sixth through eighth grades, junior high with only seventh through eighth grades), and a composite variable. Eight schools were assigned to four different intervention conditions. Three of the intervention conditions were designed to address one component related to preventing tobacco use among students. The first intervention condition addressed normative social influence, which included activities designed to help students develop skills to counteract social pressures related to tobacco use. The second intervention condition addressed informational social influence, which included activities that corrected inflated tobacco prevalence estimates and exposed advertising tactics. The third intervention condition addressed physical consequences of tobacco use, which included activities that countered misperceptions or lack of knowledge in regard to short- and long-term health-related side effects of tobacco use. The fourth intervention condition, which combined the normative social influence, the informational social influence, and the physical consequences conditions into one comprehensive curriculum, was known as Project Toward No Tobacco Use (Project TNT). This CrimeSolutions review only focused on the outcomes of the Project TNT intervention group.
In each of the four intervention conditions, four schools were urban and four rural. The control condition (eight urban and eight rural schools) were assigned to a “standard” curriculum control condition in which students received routine prevention activities provided directly by their school. These activities included assemblies that presented values clarification material, long-term physical consequences information, or simple “just say no to drugs” messages. Control schools did not provide programming specifically for tobacco-use prevention.
To determine outcomes, data was captured for both the combined Project TNT intervention and the control group through an in-class, 20-page, self-report questionnaire. Outcomes included trial use (defined as initial use) and weekly use of cigarettes and trial and weekly use of smokeless tobacco. A total of 6,716 seventh grade students provided posttest data on the school day immediately after they completed a 10-day curriculum. Fifty percent of the students were male. Regarding ethnic composition, 60 percent were white, 27 percent Hispanic, 7 percent African American, and 6 percent Asian American or other. A total of 7,052 students provided 1-year follow-up data. All data was aggregated to the school as the unit of analysis at each time point.
