A pilot study of preadolescents using focus groups to evaluate appeal of a video-based smoking prevention strategy

Every day, 3000 adolescents begin smoking.¹ The process of nicotine addiction ensures that many of today's adolescent smokers will continue tobacco use into adulthood.¹ Although widely publicized health warnings of tobacco have been disseminated, there has been no decrease in adolescent smoking over the last decade.¹ Reducing the initiation of cigarette smoking of children and youth by 50% by the year 2000 is one of the nation' health objectives.² The specific purpose of this exploratory study was to evaluate the appeal of a video-game intervention designed to prevent smoking initiation in preadolescents. Appeal was defined as the extent to which the study subjects expressed interest in the video-game intervention and the desire to continue using the game. Before evaluating the effectiveness of the educational video game as a smoking prevention strategy, it was important to determine the acceptability of this approach to children in the target population. The intervention, a health-hero video game,³ has not been used before in smoking prevention programs. Focus groups were used in which the study participants evaluated the appeal of the video game intervention. ^4,5