A skills training approach to smoking prevention among Hispanic youth

The present study was designed to test the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of a 15-session smoking prevention intervention with a predominantly hispanic (74%) sample of seventh-grade students (N = 471) in eight urban schools in the New York area. The smoking prevention curriculum teaches social resistance skills within the context of a broader intervention promoting general personal and social competence and was implemented in this study by regular classroom teachers. Results of logistic regression analyses provided preliminary evidence of the efficacy of this type of smoking prevention strategy with urban minority youth when implemented with a reasonable degree of fidelity. The significance of these findings is that they provide support for the generalizability of an approach previously found to be effective with white middle-class populations to a predominantly hispanic inner-city population.