SAN FRANCISCO – Several studies have shown that depictions of smoking in films influence adolescents to begin smoking themselves, but a new study appears to show that teens are more influenced when the bad guys smoke than when the good guys do.
After adjusting for number of covariates, Dr. Susanne E. Tanski and Dr. James D. Sargent of Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, N.H., determined that every 20 exposures to smoking by villains increased the odds that the child would begin smoking by 30%, and every 20 exposures to smoking by a “mixed” character increased the odds of smoking initiation by 16%. Both those increases were statistically significant, but there was no statistically significant increase in the odds that exposures to smoking by heroes would lead a child to begin smoking.
The study, presented in a poster session at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, involved a telephone survey of 6,521 U.S. adolescents who were recruited in 2003 by random digit dialing. About 73% of them were followed up both 8 months and 16 months later. At each survey, the adolescents were asked whether they had tried smoking and whether they had seen 50 movies randomly selected from a list of 500 popular movies that were released between 1998 and 2002.
In all, 18% of the adolescents had tried smoking by the 16-month follow-up.
Trained coders identified 3,630 characters in those 500 movies, assessed smoking status, and classified each character as positive, negative, or mixed/neutral. In all, 64% of the characters were classified as good guys, 14% of the characters were classified as bad guys, and the remaining 22% were classified as mixed or neutral.
Only 13% of the good guys were observed smoking, compared with 22% of the bad guys and 20% of the mixed or neutral characters. Given the much larger numbers of good guys in movies, however, the typical adolescent had far greater exposure to good-guy smoking than to bad-guy smoking.
The odds ratios were adjusted for social demographics, other social influences, personality factors, and parenting style.
Smoking initiation also was significantly associated with increasing age, male gender, school performance, friend or parent smoking, and rebelliousness.