DEVELOPMENT OF TOBACCO PREVENTION EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR TEACHERS AND PEER LEADERS ORIENTED ON YOUTH PROBLEMS AND VALUES

Tatiana Andreeva , MD, PhD, Konstantin Krasovsky , PhD

11th World Conference on Tobacco or Health, Chicago, USA, 2000. Abstracts, page 736.

Tobacco use among young people becomes an enormous problem for most countries of Eastern Europe. The traditional models of tobacco prevention are not effective partly because they are based on adult values and problems. Even popular peer education approach often simply uses young persons, which just repeat adult messages irrelevant to present generation of adolescents. Besides the development of possibly effective interventions is undermined by the efforts of tobacco industry to cultivate so called preventive anti-tobacco programs which are to be initially having no real impact or being counter-productive.

The project goal is to create instruments, which will let teachers and peer leaders to address tobacco-related problems in young people’s lives and to deal with the situation where tobacco is seen as a means to solve psychological problems and to meet natural needs of teenagers – training materials which could be used in work with teenagers to show them other ways to satisfy their needs and to solve their problems instead of tobacco.

The project’s objectives are: 1) To reveal and analyze tobacco-related youth problems; 2)To develop the instrument to address tobacco related problems in youth relevant way; 3)To develop self-esteem and resistance skills of adolescents by producing “Survival Kit for Non-Smokers”; 4)To train teachers to use the prepared kit in class.