Table of Contents

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Smoking among School Children (9th & 12th) Introduction The Smoking Addiction Smoking is Dangerous to your Health Aim of the Study Material Smoking Questionnaire If you smoke If you do not smoke Settings and Subjects Tools for Data Collection Methods Results Discussion Conclusion and Recommendations REFERENCES

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Smoking among School Children (9th & 12th)

Introduction
Smoking is a global problem because of the economic burden that it causes every country.
1.

According to the Framework Convention Alliance for Tobacco Control (2005), there are over 15 billion cigarettes smoked every day around the world.

2.

Its microeconomic effects to households around the world can be disastrous as it can lead to addiction that may eventually lead to hospitalization and premature death (2000).

3.

Research shows that smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (World Health Organization, 1998).

4.

A previous estimation by Scollo (1996) shows that the net cost of providing extra medical services, extra hospitalization, and extra home care nursing, in Australia alone for smokers, can reach as high as $646.7 million and can increase depending on the increase of number of smokers within the country.

5.

Another example is in Canada, where nearly 7 million Canadians smoke, and an estimated 45,000 of them die every year of tobacco related diseases (Canadian Nurses Association, 2003).

6.

Its economic effect in the country is estimated that smoking-related diseases cost reach $3 billion per year in direct health care expenses (Canadian Nurses Association, 2003).

7.

The Canadian Nurses Association (2003) further added that additional cost can be added to lost productivity, increased insurance premiums and other indirect expenses, which increase the cost of tobacco use to society to $11 billion annually.

8.

In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, it has been reported that overall prevalence of smoking was 21.1% for adult males and 0.9% for females (Jarallah et al, 1996). Furthermore, 15%-30% of Saudi adolescents smoke (Jarallah et al, 1996).

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In order to counter the negative effects of tobacco use, different smoking prevention strategies were being implemented. Several examples of anti-smoking strategies include: school based educational interventions; community interventions; mass media/public education; tobacco advertising restrictions; youth access restrictions; tobacco excise taxes; and direct restrictions on smoking. However, there are also different obstacles that may bar the effectiveness of those intervention strategies, such as: nicotine addiction; social pressures; aggressive cigarette marketing and promotion; and the vested interests of those who live and profit by cigarette sales. Furthermore, those interventions possess specific economic costs that may be a burden to the country who implements them. The age of smoking initiation has dropped over the past four decades. Since behaviors and attitudes adopted in late childhood or early puberty predicts future smoking. It is important to understand the smoking and other risk-taking behaviors and attitudes of children at an age of 12. There supports the idea of early identification and targeting of children at high risk of smoking in middle school, possibly as early as grade seven.

The Smoking Addiction

Nicotine is one of the ingredients inside the pulp of tobacco. The same ingredient is attacking the brain of the person most especially the certified smoker. The nicotine, according to the experts, is also same as the heroin or cocaine because there is an addiction and the person can hardly find the way to escape in this kind of action. The mentioned addictive drugs tend to circulate directly to the brain and may create internal casualties. Over time, the effect of the nicotine decreases and if the smoker increases his personal demand on the smoking, there is a great negative impact in achieving the quality health and well-being. In the attempt of the person to break in his smoking addiction and habits, there are obvious symptoms of withdrawal because their bodies, moods, and brain needs to adjust and this withdrawal may take some time before perfecting the strategy in avoiding to smoke again.

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The common forms of symptoms may be in depression, insomnia, irritability, frustration, anger, anxiety, restlessness, difficulty in focusing on their everyday activities.

Smoking is Dangerous to your Health

Of course, everybody who reads this kind of advertisement understands what it means and the plain message that it brings. But most people doesn t seem to care to pay attention on that message, indeed continues to patronizing the mint-feeling and circle-shaped of smoke. Noticeably, most of the convenient stores hang this reminder to the people and on the side is the line of various branded cigarettes. Seriously, the smoking really damages the health and the train of diseases will greet the internal organs of the smoker and contributes the failure of each organ to perform well. The most common diseases are the lung cancer or emphysema. Following the list is the heart disease that particularly first infecting the arteries of the heart causing to the blockage of the blood and air and triggers the heart attacks. It is different from the lung cancer and emphysema because there is no specific time on when or where the attack takes place. Unlike the lung cancer, the development of the infection may take some years and be triggered through the difficulty in breathing and can provide privilege to live a day to lie, almost lifeless, in the hospital bed. Most of the deaths among the adults are due to the heart attacks and the risk increases if the smoker did not bid to quit in his addiction. Following the heart attack is stroke, and if the person experienced the heart attack survived, there is a great chance that the body stroke might follow. Remarkably, the number of people having the stoke increases. In the association of the heart attacks and the lung cancer, the medical experts noted that the destruction of the bladder, stomach, pancreas, esophagus, larynx, mouth, and cervix is possible. The smoking clearly causes problems and the smoker should be alarmed if he experienced the increase of the bad cholesterol, blood pressure, chest pain and other related symptoms because the

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arteries are getting stiffer while other are getting thicker making it possible the clogging of the blood flow.

Aim of the Study

A. There is a need to politely evaluate such knowledge, attitude as well as behavior of school children those in 9th and 12th grade and inform them with regards to the consequences of smoking mostly affecting their health conditions. B. There is utmost goal for describing large affective factors associated with the presence of smoking among school children (grades 9 and 12) that can be through school and health campaigns showing the students that smoking is really dangerous to their health.

Material
There will be usage of questionnaire, the items in the main questionnaire need to be arranged in subscales to measure the prevalence of smoking among students, and be able to evaluate students' knowledge as well as attitudes and beliefs with respect to smoking and its negative consequences. Once the final questionnaire is developed, it will be given to a panel of two experts to review such validity of content in the questionnaire. To pretest the questionnaire and check its construct validity, it must be given to 200 students (100 boys and 100 girls) with similar characteristics as core subject and to be reviewed by focus groups of school-age children and to be tested for reliability using the test-retest method in revealing revealed such correlation coefficient of approximately 0.75. Therefore, results of study could be generalized to male and female students who attended middle schools.

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Smoking Questionnaire
1- Are you? y y Male Female

2- Which age group do you belong to? y ______

If you smoke:
3- When did you start smoking? y ______

4- Do your parents smoke? y y Yes No

5- How many of your friends smoke? y ______

6- How often do you smoke? y _______________

7- Why did you start smoking? y ______________________________________

8- Why do you keep smoking? y ______________________________________

9- Have you ever thought of quitting? y y 10y y Yes No Do you want to quit? Yes No
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y y 11y y

May be May not Do you encourage other people to smoke? Yes No

If you do not smoke:

12y 13y y 14y y 15y y 16y 17y 18y 19y y Why don't you smoke? ______________________________________ Do you ever feel left out or pressured to smoke? Yes No Have you ever tried smoking? Yes No Do your parents smoke? Yes No How many of your friends smoke? ____________ What do you think of smoking? ______________________________________ What do you think of people who smoke? ______________________________________ Do you encourage people not to smoke? Yes No

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20y y

Are you happy with your decision not to smoke? Yes No

Settings and Subjects

There needs to have a total number of 100 boys and 100 girls attending grades 9 and 12 have to be selected at random from 15 middle schools in the city by means of using multistage cluster random sampling.

Tools for Data Collection Tool 1

This tool will reflect first hand responses of the subjects and serves as the ideal primary source of the study. This tool is effective in terms of showing statistical data outcomes for analysis and interpretation.

Tool 2
The one tool utilize in the study will be related to cross-sectional investigation to be conducted basing on social inoculation theory as there can be appropriate dissemination of true beliefs and attitudes of students regarding smoking effects on them. This is good tool to develop health education curriculum for schools to prevent risk taking behaviors for instance, frequent cigarette smoking that is true to the school-aged children.

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Methods Results
The assumed results could be that the beliefs and attitudes of children smokers towards negative consequences attributed to smoking will be significantly different from those of nonsmokers among grade levels and both sex groups. Both smokers and non-smokers can be knowledgeable about health and consequences of smoking. However, certain sense of invulnerability to the health issues will attribute to cigarette smoking and be identified among children smokers of both groups.

Discussion
The discussion in obtaining reliable research findings and results will be administered in back up to related literature studies and several secondary researches being done as good reference for the study. The discussion will be precise and detailed in content and explanations as required and imperative for realization of the study.

Conclusion and Recommendations

True, that those 9th and 12th grade students who smoke cigarettes have different beliefs and attitudes towards smoking than those who do not smoke. Therefore, it is necessary to develop educational curricula for schools to teach students about negative effects on health when it comes to smoking during middle yet young age. Thus, such essential facet of the curricula in schools should emphasize useful and effective ways to empower school children with life skills needed in overcoming strong reality of peer pressure that can greatly encourage them to smoke often as it should be.

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Thus, schools should be encouraged to conduct regular prevalence studies, develop appropriate curricula, ban smoking on the premises and involve parents fully. Educational programs should begin by about age 8-10, with high priority for the 11-15 age groups. Programs based on education for personal growth are probably preferable to purely information giving approaches, but both can be effective if the learner is actively involved. The students should be educated that smoking cannot make them look good and grown up and feel relaxed and it cannot help them to cope with stress or solve their problems and is appropriate to focus on modifying students attitude toward smoking. Also, the banning of cigarette advertisement is useful as directly and or indirectly should take control of policy in helping discourage school children to involve in smoking. Make it Quit! The call of the health care professionals to quit the smoking literally means that there is no benefit that a person can gain in his addiction. Although the hard episodes of withdrawal is a great challenge, still many people successfully quit in the chain of smoking. There is no medical prescription that the doctors might give to the people but the only thing that is left for an individual is the willingness and his initiative to quit his bad habits. A person can go to the medical advisors and turn to his family for help because through the aid of other people, the feeling of withdrawal can lessen and the adjustment might be easy.

REFERENCES
Discourage the onset of smoking in children knowledge of immediate physiological effects and parents smoking. Kozlowski LT, Heatherton TF. Self-report issues in cigarette smoking: state of the art and future directions. Belief assessment as a component of curriculum planning: cigarette smoking as an example. World Health Organization Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Islamic Ruling on Smoking.
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