Evaluation of interventions to reduce smoking 1We would like to thank those members of the Eastern Surrey Health Promotion Unit, both past and present, who were involved with this project for their invaluable help and our thanks also go to the Eastern Surrey Health Authority whose funding made this research possible. Our gratitude is due to the Head Teachers and staff of all our schools and, very importantly, to the children themselves. We would also like to acknowledge helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this manuscript.

This paper reports some of the findings from a large-scale (N = 4970) longitudinal study evaluating the efficacy of two types of school-based intervention designed to discourage cigarette smoking in children between the ages of nine and thirteen. The interventions were in the form of a Theatre in Health Education (THE) programme and a school smoking policy which involved changes in adult behaviour. The research adopted a quasi-experimental design, following children from primary to secondary education where necessary over a period of two and a half years. Five waves of questionnaire data were collected with biochemical markers in the form of saliva samples which served as a “bogus pipeline”. Though absolute levels of smoking were low, the findings indicate a weak positive effect over the longer term of both interventions on smoking behaviour (past and current) for girls but no such effect for boys. Conversely, there was no impact for girls on a measure of intention to smoke, although a small long term effect was found for boys in the Theatre in Health Education intervention group. Effects of the interventions on targeted psychological variables were also minor. Possible reasons for these effects are discussed.