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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Dianne C. Barker, MHS¹, Sherry Emery, PhD², Paul Mowery, MS³, Gary Giovino, PhD⁴, Julia Gable, MS⁵, Glen Szczypka², and C.Tracy Orleans, PhD⁶. (1) Barker Bi-Coastal Health, 3556 Elm Drive, Calabasas, CA 91302, 818-876-0689, dcbarker@earthlink.net, (2) Institute for Health Research and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 W. Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608, (3) Office of Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Highway, NW MS-K50, Atlanta, GA 30341, (4) Department of Health Behavior, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences, Elm and Carlton Streets, Buffalo, NY 14263, (5) RTI International, 2951 Flowers Road South, Suite 119, Atlanta, GA 30341, (6) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Rt 1 & College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08540

Although almost all states manage telephone quit lines, few have tailored marketing or quit line protocols for young smokers. Broad-based marketing increases quitline utilization in the general population. We merged weighted data from the 2003 baseline wave of the National Youth Smoking Cessation Survey, a two-year longitudinal telephone survey of 2,582 randomly selected U.S. smokers aged 16-24 years with tobacco counter-advertising data from the University of Illinois at Chicago Media Database, to study the effects of quitline marketing on young smokers' quitting behavior, and awareness of, preference for, and use of telephone quit lines. Seventy-seven percent of young smokers had ever tried to quit. Awareness of quit lines was higher among quit attempters living in states with a quit line (49%), than among those in states without a quit line (30%; p<0.001). Only 2% of quit attempters had ever called a quit line, compared to more than one-fifth of quit attempters who had ever tried NRT or talked with a health professional about quitting. Over one-half (55%) of respondents lived in a designated marketing area that aired a state-sponsored television ad with a quitline tag during 2003. Implications of these findings will be discussed in the context of how quit line services should be designed and marketed to young smokers.

Learning Objectives:

• (1) To articulate the relationship between the marketing of quitlines and young smokers’ quitting behavior.
• (2) To explore how state tobacco control decision-makers might better tailor quitline marketing messages to increase demand for these services among young smokers.

Keywords: Media Campaigns, Youth

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered