Preventing cigarette smoking among children: results of a four-year evaluation of the PAL program

The issue of prevention of tobacco use has received a great deal of attention in recent years. As an outgrowth of this interest, several smoking prevention programs based on a social influence approach have been developed. One example of these types of programs is the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) prevention program which was produced by Health and Welfare Canada. We discuss the preliminary results of a prospective cohort evaluation of the PAL program. This evaluation suggests that the program has some utility in preventing the uptake of tobacco use among young males; however, its efficacy with females has been negligible. It is clear that prevention programming will have to consider targeting males and females in different ways.