[tips] Re: Stopping smoking

[Marie Helweg-Larsen]

Points all well taken - the evidence is hardly perfect and mostly correlational. But that doesn't mean that it is not true. Asking kids what influenced their decisions to smoke (or not) is not "incontrovertible evidence" but it is also not irrelevant or useless. Just because their answers might seem to correspond to what "everyone thinks" doesn't mean that it is not what in fact influenced them. So a researcher who doubts these findings should do research to counter it. Perhaps a study showing that kids think that they are influenced by their parents' smoking attitudes but they are really not (that would be an important and interesting study). As is always the case with scientific progress (such as it is) it is the disbelievers who must prove something is different from what the prevailing scientific knowledge at the time. So where is the (high quality) evidence that adult modeling of smoking (independent of genetics) is irrelevant in predicting smoking onset? Marie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 4 Dec 2006 at 9:01, Marie Helweg-Larsen wrote: Yes, Judith Harris argues that parents don't matter (as she always does) except by passing on their genes. However, tons of research show that the more adult smokers a child is exposed to the more likely it is that she smokes (not just genetically related adults). Kids themselves also say that they are influenced by what their parents say about smoking (the point: children interpret no anti-smoking messages or ambiguous anti- smoking messages as implicit consent/support for smoking). Crawford,M. A. (2001). Cigarette smoking and adolescents: Messages they see and hear. Public Health Reports, 116, 203-215. I dunno. Judy Harris is a very careful observer, and I've never known her to make an assertion without the evidence to back it up. The NY Times won't allow the space in a letter-to-the-editor to provide it. Her forte is in showing that, "tons of evidence" notwithstanding, most, if not all, studies purporting to show rearing effects are flawed in various ways, including but not limited to ignoring confounding with genetic effects. There's a whole lotta bad research out there, and quantity doesn't make it better. I wonder how well the claim that "the more adult smokers a child is exposed to the more likely it is that she smokes" stands up under scrutiny as incontrovertible evidence that adults' smoking behaviour influences that of children. For one, it's a correlation, and even if they somehow manage to remove the genetic component (most of the smokers a child is exposed to will be family members), that still leaves other ways for confounding to occur. I went to the Crawford source cited by Marie to see (tried to, anyway), but it turns out to be relevant only to the "kids say" part of her post. It's a study of focus groups which finds that teens say that family is influential in their decision to smoke or not smoke. But that's what everyone thinks, and what everyone thinks isn't necessarily right. That's why we do research. BTW, PubMed says the Crawford paper is in supplement 1. But the Public Health Reports website curiously lists only a supplement 2 for that volume, which doesn't include it. So it doesn't seem to be available on- line. Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 0C8 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english -- ********************************************* Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773 Carlisle, PA 17013 Office: (717) 245-1562, Fax: (717) 245-1971 Webpage: www.dickinson.edu/~helwegm ********************************************* --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english