Promoting compliance with smokefree schools: Changing social
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: The proposed research represents a collaborative effort between San Diego City Schools (SDCS) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The area of particular interest to both SDCS and UCSD involves identifying an optimal strategy to enforce San Diego City Schools' Zero Tolerance for Tobacco Policy.
 
 
 
 
 
 School smoking policies, such as the SDCS policy, can be viewed as an important tool to influence student norms and smoking. Just as workplace smoking policies have been demonstrated to reduce both smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption among adults, school smoking policies can discourage smoking in two ways: by making smoking inconvenient and by making smoking officially recognized as an undesirable activity.
 
 
 
 
 
 Despite the theoretical promise of smokefree school policies to reduce adolescent smoking, research has shown that school-based tobacco use policies were inconsistently enforced and, as a result, conveyed mixed messages to students. Further, preliminary data suggest that exposure to smoking at school increases the probability that a student will smoke in the future. Although the SDCS policy is one of the most aggressive approaches in California and the US for achieving a smoke-free learning environment, enforcement of the policy across schools and even among individual student policy-violators has been inconsistent, and has created additional unforeseen consequences. Enforcement and compliance issues are most acute in the high school environment, so we have chosen to focus exclusively on high schools.
 
 
 
 
 
 The specific aims of this proposal for a pilot Schools-Academic Research Award (SARA) are three-fold: The first goal is to solidify a partnership between researchers in the Cancer Prevention Program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the San Diego City Schools (SDCS). The second goal is to identify a) the barriers to enforcement of and compliance with the SDCS smokefree schools policy and b) opportunities and strategies to overcome these barriers so that enforcement of the SDCS policy is a feasible and effective component of the district's overall strategy to reduce smoking. The third goal is to develop improved strategies for implementing the District's smokefree schools policy, and to incorporate these new strategies into a full SARA proposal, which will implement and evaluate the strategies developed in the Pilot project. It is envisaged that the follow-up grant from this pilot award will propose a randomized, controlled trial of the intervention, comparing outcomes of the new intervention with those obtained under the current system.
 
 
 
 
 
 The pilot project will employ qualitative data collection and analysis techniques, interviewing administrators, school police, teachers, and health educators, as well as conducting focus groups with students and reviewing enforcement records at individual schools and the District.