Smoking In Movies Linked To Kids Lighting Up

Main Category: Smoking / Quit Smoking
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 10 Jan 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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A new research study, published in the January issue of Pediatrics found that young people who start smoking may be influenced to do so by movies they saw in early childhood.

The study also found that almost 80 per cent of the exposure to smoking scenes in movies came through films rated "G," "PG" and "PG-13."

Linda Titus-Ernstoff, a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth Medical School and study author said, "Movies seen at the youngest ages had as much influence over later smoking behaviour as the movies that children had seen recently."

She added, "I'm increasingly convinced that this association between smoking exposure in films and smoking initiation is real. That's to say, causal. It is quite improbable that the association we see is due to some other influence, some other characteristic inherent in children or parental behaviour. The relationship is clearly between movie smoking and smoking initiation."

The study interviewed 2,200 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 12 who were enrolled in grades four through six in 26 elementary schools in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Starting in 2002 and 2003, the researchers conducted interviews with the children, and their parents, to track whether or not the children had smoked in the past.

The researchers used a list of 50 movies compiled from a larger pool of 550 films drawn from the top 100 box-office hits released over the five and a half years before the study started in 2002. Forty per cent of the films were rated "R," 40 per cent "PG-13," 14 per cent "PG," and 5 per cent "G."

All the movies on the lists were coded for the number of smoking occurrences, instances in which major, minor or tangential characters used or handled tobacco for the first time in a new scene.

The researchers said while 21 per cent of the smoking occurrences were found in "R" movies [adult], slightly more than 60 per cent were found in "PG-13" movies, and almost 19 per cent were found in "G" or "PG" films, the researchers said.

By the third survey, almost 10 per cent of the kids had started to smoke, and on average had viewed almost 37 films. That translated into an average exposure to almost 150 smoking occurrences.

After accounting for other factors that might influence behaviour, the researchers concluded that 35 per cent of smoking initiation among the children was directly attributable to seeing smoking scenes on the screen.

Danny McGoldrick, vice president of research with the non-profit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, described the new study as "very strong" in terms of both its approach and findings.

He said, "This adds to the already existing evidence of the impact that smoking in movies has and the last thing we need is for Hollywood to be helping the tobacco companies create a positive image around a product that ultimately kills half the people who use it, and a product whose vast majority of users start as children."

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