Smoking significantly contributes to the global burden of disease. At the same time, smoking is a cause of death that actually can be prevented. Smoking is still very common, especially among young people.
Tobacco use increases with age, with tobacco debuts at an early age, there is a greater risk for addiction and the development of tobacco-related diseases later in life. Schools are a central platform for health promotion work. The initiatives that so far have been introduced in schools are preventative and aim students not to start smoking in the first place. There limited amount of studies looking at smoking cessation among this group and there a paucity of evidence-based smoking cessation interventions targeting secondary school students.
The aim with NEXit junior is to improve a revised version of an existing SMS-based intervention. We have developed an intervention targeting university students, now we are developing and testing a similar intervention on secondary school students in Sweden.
Three main aims
- To conduct a formative evaluation of an innovative SMS-based stop smoking intervention among secondary school students.
- To test different strategies for recruiting young people to join the intervention during 2016.
- To implement and evaluate the effect of the SMS-based intervention during 2017-2018 in a randomised controlled study including intervention and control groups. The control group will have access to the intervention at 3 months follow-up.
