Examining the impact of changes in school tobacco control policies and programs on current smoking and susceptibility to future smoking among youth in the first two years of the COMPASS study: looking back to move forward
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: School-based prevention activities continue to be an important tobacco control resource, however there is little guidance for school-based tobacco control programming within Ontario. The objective of this study is to identify real-world changes in school-based tobacco control programs or policies in the COMPASS study and examine of those interventions (natural experiments) had any impact on the school-level prevalence of smoking susceptibility and current smoking over time. METHODS: This paper uses longitudinal school-level smoking behaviour data from Year 1 (Y1: 2012-13) and Year 2 (Y2: 2013-14) of the COMPASS study. Changes to school-level tobacco control programs and policies were measured using the COMPASS School Programs and Policies Questionnaire and knowledge broker follow-up interviews. Quasi-experimental tests of proportion and difference-in-difference models were used to evaluate the impact of the interventions identified between Y1 and Y2 on school-level prevalence of smoking susceptibility among never smokers and current smoking. RESULTS: Between Y1 and Y2, 17 schools reported a change in their tobacco control programming or policies. In four of the intervention schools, the increase in the within-school prevalence of susceptible never smokers between Y1 and Y2 was significantly greater than the natural change observed in the control schools. In five of the intervention schools, the decrease in the within-school prevalence of current smokers between Y1 and Y2 was significantly greater than the natural change observed in the control schools. Only two of the new interventions evaluated (both focused on policies of progressive punishment for students caught smoking on school property), were associated with significant desirable changes in both smoking susceptibility and current smoking between Y1 and Y2. DISCUSSION: Interventions specific to effective and enforced tobacco control were the most common and consistently had the desired impact on the school-level prevalence of smoking susceptibility and current smoking. Due to the variation in the types of interventions implemented and their effectiveness, additional evaluation evidence is necessary to determine the most successful activities and contexts among individual students. The results presented here highlight which of these real-world promising interventions should be further evaluated using the longitudinal individual-level data in COMPASS over time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".