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Helping Young Smokers Quit: Identifying Best Practices for Tobacco Cessation
The Helping Young Smokers Quit initiative is a four-year, two-phase project that addresses the critical need to develop and disseminate effective, developmentally appropriate cessation programs for adolescent smokers. While a growing number of teen cessation programs are available, little is known about: how many programs exist, where they are located, what services they offer, what populations they serve, or how they provide treatment. Moreover, only a handful of such programs have been evaluated.
Helping Young Smokers Quit: Identifying Best Practices for Tobacco Cessation is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation National Program that is managed out of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Health Research and Policy Centers. The program is co-funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-Office on Smoking and Health, and the National Cancer Institute-Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Tobacco Control Branch. Susan J. Curry, PhD, Director of the Health Research and Policy Centers at UIC, is the HYSQ Director; Sherry Emery, MBA, PhD is the Associate Director; and Amy K. Sporer, MS is the Deputy Director. The HYSQ core team includes a number of UIC Co-Investigators - Michael Berbaum, PhD, Dick Campbell, PhD, Brian Flay, DPhil, Tim Johnson, PhD, Robin Mermelstein, PhD, and Dick Warnecke, PhD. Collaborating organizations include: the UIC Survey Research Laboratory, RTI International, and Westat.
The HYSQ initiative fills a gap in knowledge about the numbers and distribution of youth cessation programs, as well as the types of treatment approaches and program components that are currently offered across the US. It will identify effective program models and promising directions for future research. Results will help states, communities, schools, and other community-based and youth-serving organizations adopt and implement programs that work, and provide standards and tools for self-evaluations.
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