Does the association between exposure to smoking in movies and adolescents’ desire to smoke depend on how smoking is portrayed: A randomized lab study with matched movie clips
*Claude Setodji, RAND Corporation 

Keywords: smoking, advertising and marketing for adolescence, randomized lab experiment, causality

Exposure to smoking in movies is strongly associated with smoking uptake and maintenance among adolescents. However little is known about whether the ways in which smoking is portrayed in movies (e.g., the context of the smoking or the apparent motivation for a character’s smoking) affects the strength of the association between exposure to movie smoking and adolescent smoking. This laboratory study examined whether exposure to movie smoking that is portrayed as motivated (i.e. the character who is smoking appears to have a reason to smoke) is associated with adolescent viewers’ desire to smoke differently than is smoking that is portrayed as having no clear motive. A sample of middle school students randomized either to view movie clips that portrayed smoking or to view otherwise similar movie clips (same movie, same characters, similar situations) that did not portray smoking. Movie clips that contained smoking portrayed it as either instrumental in facilitating social interaction, instrumental in managing negative affect, or having no clear function. After exposure to each clip, participants in both conditions rated their desire to smoke. Exposure to clips where smoking was portrayed as helping characters to manage negative affect or to facilitate social interaction was associated with a significantly stronger desire to smoke compared with clips where the character’s motive for smoking was unclear. These results suggest that the way that smoking is portrayed in movies is important in determining its effect on adolescent smoking.