3 APPROACHES TO ADOLESCENT SMOKING DETECTION - A COMPARISON OF EXPERTASSESSMENT, ANONYMOUS SELF-REPORT, AND CO MEASUREMENT

A new method designed to assess adolescent smoking was recently develo ped and applied by researchers in the former Soviet Union. As original ly applied in Lithuania and Russia, two official student leaders from each class were chosen to estimate smoking prevalence rates for their class, and so the method became labeled as the ''expert assessment.'' Their findings suggested that this ''expert assessment'' method agreed quite well with school-wide prevalence estimates based on a survey of the entire school population. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether student representatives, selected at random and coa ched to accurately summarize the smoking habits of their classmates, c ould provide accurate estimates of the smoking prevalence rate in thei r school. To accomplish this purpose, estimates from the student repre sentatives were compared to those from an anonymous survey and from me asurement of carbon monoxide in expired air. The results indicated tha t the self-report and carbon monoxide data were in close agreement, wh ile the student representatives substantially overestimated the preval ence of smoking in their school, in spite of the coaching provided acc ording to the ''expert assessment'' protocol. Additional research on a lternative methods to select student representatives, such as those ba sed on a sociometric analysis, may yet result in a low-cost method to assess school-wide levels of smoking in adolescent populations.