Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #116974

Amy Bleakley, PhD, MPH, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215.573.1961, ableakley@asc.upenn.edu and Peter Messeri, PhD, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 722 West 168th Street, Room 1121, New York, NY 10032.

School-based tobacco control policy is an important area to examine in the context of youth smoking behavior. First, there are well-developed guidelines, or normative framework, of how policies should operate (i.e. CDC Best Practices Guidelines); schools are natural venues for reaching large numbers of youth and enacting widespread change; and schools impact the more proximal social and physical environments of youth. Data from the NYTS 2000 and 2000 surveys of youth and schools was used to investigate the relationship between youth smoking rates and the implementation of school-based practices as reported by school administrators. School policy measures were organized into dimensions (instructional, environmental, and cessation) based on the Best Practices recommendations. Instructional practices were those focusing on educational approaches to tobacco prevention; environmental included policies influencing both the physical (i.e. prohibition of smoking on school grounds) and social (i.e. disciplinary actions) environments, and cessation policies referred to the provision or referral of cessation-based services. Overall comprehensiveness of guideline implementation was also assessed. Student data was converted into school-level smoking rates (n=501). Descriptive analyses of the school policies were conducted to estimate the frequency with which particular policies were implemented and mean scores for each index were calculated. Regression analysis showed that with the exception of cessation practices, school policies were not significantly associated with lower rates of youth smoking. It is possible that cessation policies, implemented less frequently than other policies, are markers of schools that are more compliant with the Best Practices Guidelines.

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