RESEARCH | SMOKING IN YOUNG PEOPLE Zach Hamilton Samantha Ball

“ ” The purpose of this research is to support our public awareness campaign. Our chosen subject was anti- smoking and was to be targeted at Thomas Rotherham college students.

METHOD OF RESEARCH We conducted an online survey using SurveyMonkey.com which we sent to all TRC Students. This primary research method would enable us to find out the smoking habits of young people within the college and the possible reasons behind their smoking habits. We chose to ask TRC Students as they were our target market for our campaigns, therefore we were able to use more relevant statistics in our material.

COLLECTING RESPONSES We gathered a total of 243 responses. However, due to having a basic Survey Monkey account and not a paid premium account we were only able to access 100 of these responses – this means we will not get all of the responses when gathering our data. On the other hand, this could be beneficial as the narrowed data has selected a random sample of 100 responses, which will make the statistical analysis much easier and less biased if we were to narrow it down ourselves

QUESTION 1 First of all, we asked students to provide us with their gender. The reason for this question was to gain an accurate ratio of males to females who responded to the survey. This also helps us to identify any trends between the gender and smoking habits. We did not provide a non-specific gender option which would often be included in modern day surveys, as it would not influence our research.

QUESTION 1 60% of students, which was the majority vote, who answered our survey were female whereas only 40% were male. There are 1501 students within the college and 53% of those are female; we got this statistic from the college itself. This percentage shows that the 60% of females are due to the majority of college being mainly female. This information has not influenced who the campaign will be targeted at as we have decided that our campaigns will be gender- neutral in order to avoid sexism.

QUESTION 2 We asked for the age of students at college as there are a variety of different aged students amongst AS, students, A2 students and 3 rd year students. We wanted to know if age had any noticeable influence on smoking and peoples smoking habits to see whether younger students are influenced by the possible “trend” of smoking rather than the “enjoyment” from it.

QUESTION 2 48% of the students who answered the survey said they were 17 years old and there were no responses from anybody over the age of 18. This tells us that the majority of respondents are not legally old enough to buy cigarettes but are eligible to smoke them and only 30% of respondents are old enough to purchase tobacco products.

QUESTION 3 For this question, we were supposed to make it a compulsory response, however, there was a technical error which resulted in people being able to skip this question which may effect our results. However, only 8 people skipped this question and the remaining 92 answered which doesn’t drastically effect the results. The reason for asking this question to find out and acknowledge an average of how many people we needed to advise to stop smoking.

QUESTION 3 Over 52% of pupils said they had never tried a cigarette and the remaining 48% stated that they had. These results are not entirely accurate as not everybody answered this question, therefore the data is slightly skewed. This data tells us that our campaigns should not only offer quitting advice for the 48% who do smoke, but also needs to emphasise and influence people to not try smoking or reason against continuously smoking.

QUESTION 4 Question 4 was an open response question, allowing us to gather personal responses from the people who responded to the survey. We used this question in order to determine the reasons behind young people smoking and to see if there was a frequent trend in the reasoning's. This would help us to market our campaigns at TRC students. For example, do young people really smoke because of their friends or do they influence themselves.

QUESTION 4 These are some of the most common keywords the 47 students who responded to the question used when answering if they had any influences on smoking. The open response allowed us to gain a wider range of ideas as to why people smoke and from this we were able to find out that there were a lot more different reasons than we originally thought for smoking. This means our campaigns should be more generic, rather than focusing on one particular factor or influence on smoking.

QUESTION 5 After we had published this survey we realised that the question was too generic to gain useful data from. The lexis ‘regularly’ could have easily been misinterpreted by the respondents as smoking daily (for example once a day) to every time they socialise (for example every hour etc). 8 students skipped this question which again could affect the accuracy of the data.

QUESTION 5 The vast majority of students agreed that they did not smoke on a regular basis, leaving 15% to say that they did. These results show that our campaigns should focus more on influencing people to not try smoking or lower the temptation to smoke, rather than advising ways to quit smoking or ways to get help on quitting the habit.

QUESTION 6 92 people responded to our final question and only 15 of these responded with a value greater than smoking no (0) cigarettes. However, we are considering one of these answers to be an anomalous result, because after viewing the respondents completed survey it seemed evident that the response was done for sarcastic purposes rather than answering seriously. We asked this question to determine how addictive students find cigarettes, which would then influence and determine how extreme and realistic our campaigns had to be.