Reducing Parents' and Children's Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke

Year Awarded: 2002
Project Leaders:
Dawn Contreras, MSU Extension, Margot Kurtz Department of Family and Community Medicine, J.C. Kurtz, MSU Department of Mathematics

Project Description:
The Reducing Parents' and Children's Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke program investigated whether an educational intervention would improve knowledge, attitudes, and preventive efforts with respect to exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) among low-income women in the MSU Extension Family and Consumer Sciences Programs. This project was designed in response to the fact that smoking rates in the State of Michigan are higher than in the rest of the nation (25.6% versus 23.5% nationally) and among adults with no more than 12 years of fromal education, rates are even higher (30.6%). Thus exposure to environmental tobacco smoke in the home poses a major health problem for nonsmokers, particularly spouses and children of smokers.

The specific aims of the project were to assess the women's knowledge, attitudes and preventive efforts with respect to exposure to ETS, to develop and implement an educational health promotion intervention with the intent of improving the women's knowledge base, attitudes and preventive behaviors with respect to exposure to ETS as well as reducing exposure to ETS for their children, and to assess the effectiveness of the health promotion intervention with a pre-test post-test model.

Recent Developments:

The curriculum was piloted in four community sites. Community-based instructors are continuing to teach the 4-part program to low-income women who are parents of young children. Pretest and posttest data are still being collected to determine changes in parental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to their children's exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. Moreover, instructors are completing formative evaluation tools to determine satisfaction with the curriculum content, format, and mode of delivery.

A statewide training was conducted on the new curriculum on October 15, 2002 at the fall MSU Extension conference. There were 39 home visitors in attendance. This training allowed all counties in Michigan the opportunity to offer the program to their clientele.

A proposal was submitted to showcase the curriculum at the National Youth at Risk conference in May 2003.

There are plans to submit articles to professional journals about the new health intervention project on reducing exposure to environmental tobacco smoke.