Philippe Boucher's Rendez Vous: Rendez-vous with . . . Patrick Jamieson
Rendez-vous with . . . Patrick Jamieson
Researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
jamieson@asc.upenn.edu
By Philippe Boucher
Rendez-vous 127
Thursday, February 7 2002
PB : Thank you Patrick for accepting our rendez-vous.
May I ask you to introduce yourself ?
Patrick Jamieson: My name is Patrick Jamieson. I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. I study adolescent risk behaviors including youth perceptions of tobacco use. My emphasis in school is education, communication, and psychology.
Q1. What triggered your interest for a family approach to smoking cessation?
Patrick Jamieson: We conducted two surveys: one in 1999 n=600 and one in 2000 n=2000+. The surveys included questions about smokers' parents and we learned that youth smokers are more likely to plan to quit if their parent(s) were ill.
Q2. When you looked at the household factors that encourage young people and adults to quit it seems that the main factor was the smoking related illness of one family member. Can you elaborate on that?
Patrick Jamieson: Unfortunately because of the way our questions were worded we only know that the youth smoker's parents were ill, not necessarily ill from smoking. We are putting better-worded questions in the field to resolve this situation.
Q3. What is the notion of perceived risk? Can media campaigns, dire warnings, the prohibition of smoking in public places, impact the way smoking is perceived?
Patrick Jamieson: I believe that media campaigns that deglamorize smoking with short term consequences e.g smelly breath, yellow teeth and fingers such as the ad that analogized kissing a smoker to kissing an ashtray work better than ones that threaten young people with risks young people don't perceive as harmful in the short term including heart disease, stroke and lung or mouth cancer. Unfortunately, even if the 'right' message is communicated to young people it has to compete with eight times as much money (8 billion dollars U.S.) selling smoking as sexy fun and sophisticated. Others have noted that this constitutes a lack of free speech for anti tobacco forces because if we were in a debate and you could say eight times more than I could in the same amount of time I wouldn't be able to communicate effectively.
Q4. Looking at your data it seems there are much less families with adult and child smoker in the West (16.5%) than in the Midwest (32.3%), the South (29;1%) and the Northeast (22%). Could that be a consequence of the tobacco control campaigns that have been stronger in the West?
Patrick Jamieson: It would take further analysis by more researchers to answer that question.
Q5. Your conclusion is that families should be encouraged to quit together. How do you dot that? Should family oriented quit and wins be organized? Can you give examples of family focused cessation programs?
Patrick Jamieson: I identified a population of adult and youth smokers that could be persuaded to quit together. My hope is that smoking cessation experts design and test a program that uses families of smokers as the unit of analysis.
PB: Thank you Patrick for taking the time to be with us today.
Rendez-vous is supported by a contract from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
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