Decreasing Teen Smoking

This experiment contained fifteen participants who were all in between fourteen and seventeen years old. All of the participants had minimal understanding of the risk factor that is involved in smoking cigarettes. The participants took a questionnaire before going to the teen smoking program which was a game that the participants played. The game was to make the teens feel like they were smoking while being exposed to therapy. Therapy such as the most effective way to quit smoking and what reduces smoking cravings. After the game the participants took a Presence and Realism Questionnaire, a Post-Exposure Simulator Sickness Questionnaire and a post study questionnaire. The participants filled out questionnaires for the researchers to obtain their results.    

Through this experiment the researchers found that after playing the game the participants became more aware of the risk factors in smoking and decided it was important to stay away from activities that made them want to smoke. The participant’s answers pre-game and post-game questionnaires ranged in different answers from 8-50%. The results from the Presence and Realism Questionnaire were that, the realism effect the researchers were trying to portray was above average.

Implications to this study are that teens who understand the risks involved in smoking more times than not, decide not to involve themselves in activities that cause them to smoke.  If more teens

understood the risks in would decrease the amount of teens that start the bad habit of smoking. It would be beneficial to have teens informed though these types of programs in middle and high schools.

One limitation to this study is that there were only fifteen participants involved in the study. Fifteen participants is a small sample size which makes it hard to generalize this study to all teens. Another limitation is the questionnaires. Filling out questionnaires makes the researchers rely on self-report. Self- report is not always accurate because people can lie.

Abstract

Source: Gao, K., Wiederhold, M., Kong, L., & Wiederhold, B. (2013). Clinical experiment to assess effectiveness of virtual reality teen smoking cessation program. Studies In Health Technology And Informatics, 19 158-62.