Media Literacy
1
Media Literacy and Smoking Prevention Among Adolescents: A Year-Two Evaluation of the
American Legacy Foundation/Washington State Department of Health Anti-Tobacco Campaign
Abstract
A pretest/posttest quasi-experiment (N=723) with control groups was used to evaluate the
effectiveness of a media literacy curriculum implemented during 2002 in the state of
Washington. The posttest-only analysis, employing a Solomon-Four-Group design, showed that
nonsmokers who participated in the curriculum had higher intentions to take action against
tobacco use, reflective thinking about the persuasive effects of advertising, perceived realism of
ads, perceived similarity of tobacco portrayals, and perceived desirability of tobacco portrayals.
This suggests that their awareness of the content in tobacco advertising had been increased,
along with their motivations to resist it. Smokers who participated in the media literacy
intervention demonstrated greater knowledge, efficacy, intentions to take action, reflective
thinking, and perceived realism of tobacco ads. They demonstrated lower levels of
identification with media portrayals of smokers, expectancies for tobacco use, and susceptibility
to peer influence to use tobacco. This suggests that smokers changed a number of attitudes and
beliefs predictive of tobacco use, in addition to a greater motivation to resist tobacco advertising.
The results suggest that media literacy has important and somewhat different effects on tobacco
users and nonusers, indicating its potential for broad application in health communication
campaigns.