Latest update January 23rd, 2025 2:17 AM
Aug 13, 2017 News
– GYTS Consultant
Although the tobacco use situation among local youths has been uncovered through the Global Youth Tobacco Survey [GYTS], the real work to determine why a vast majority of youths are smoking will now have to commence.
This deduction was recently made by Dr. Morris Edwards, the Pan American Health Organisation/ World Health Organisation [PAHO/WHO] Consultant on the GYTS 2015 Report.
According to Dr. Edwards, the findings will now warrant focus group discussions and other techniques to determine why the school-aged youths who represented the survey sample were involved in the practice of tobacco use.
“We need to find out the ‘why’ and that should also help in terms of the programmes that have to be put in place,” said Dr. Edwards.
He pointed out that among the objectives of the GYTS was that there would be a reduction in current tobacco use, among students from 21 percent in the previous survey in 2010 to 15 percent in 2015. Based on the 2015 survey, the overall current tobacco use is 11.7 percent of the sample. According to Dr. Edwards, it was also hoped that current cigarette use in Guyana would move from 10 percent in 2010 to seven percent in 2015. In 2015 the overall current cigarette use percentage amounted to 8.6 percent of the sample.
Further it was hoped that there would be moves to increase the tobacco use cessation attempts. This essentially meant that there would be an increase in the proportion of youths who actually attempted to quit smoking, regardless of the addictive nature of smoking.
The smoking cessation in 2010 was 76 percent but it was hoped that this would have increased to 81 per cent in 2015. Based on the results of the survey, the overall percentage in this regard stood at 70.1 percent while 75.8 percent said that they thought they wanted to quit.
Only a mere 30.4 percent of students said that they had received help/advice from a programme or professional to stop smoking.
“Thinking that you would be able to quit and actually trying to quit, there is a disparity in that…so you can see that those who actually tried to stop smoking overall, there was a reduction. In those who tried to stop smoking this was more significant in girls. None of us can answer what’s the reason for that but that is something that we need to go and find out,” noted Dr. Edwards.
Another crucial objective of the survey was to increase knowledge about the harmful effect of other people’s smoke on the students. However, Dr. Edwards acknowledged that “we are now recognising that it is a fallacy to think that just by providing them [students] with the knowledge is going to increase their attempts to quit smoking.”
“The tools weren’t there,” said Dr. Edwards about the students who wanted to stop smoking. As such he speculated that “with the proper assistance and tools these students could stop smoking forever.”
Dr. Edwards however took into consideration that while this is an “easy statement…we recognised that you have to deal with the addictive part of nicotine and looking beyond the governmental services; how can we bring on board the non-governmental organisations to play a vital role as a resource for youths interested in quitting.”
The GYTS was conducted from November to December of 2015 and the sample frame consisted of students from forms one to three of public schools. The sample size was 1, 697 drawn 69 classes of 25 public schools. According to Dr. Edwards, “selection was voluntary, so it meant that students could have actually refused to participate and the other thing is that it was anonymous, so there is no way that you could link the results with any particular student.” Allowing the response to be anonymous, was important, since Dr. Edwards noted that students were more inclined to be truthfully with their answers. Added to this, he related that “if it is self administered then there is not that much pressure for persons to actually lie about their use.”
The multiple choice responses were scanned and then uploaded into a database before they were analysed. However, Dr. Edwards noted that the database used will make it possible for further analysis of the data.
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