Parental Awareness on Teenage Smoking Behavior in Yogyakarta and Bali

Published by Mr Agianto (AASIC 5th)

2017-07-26

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Smoking or being healthy is not a suitable offers to young teenagers (ages 13-15 years), because they have not able to take responsibility for the negative impacts of their choices on smoking behaviors. In addition, they have not been well informed about cigarettes and their dangers. The data indicate that there was a high rate of smoking behavior for adolescents aged 13-15 years (55.71%), including trial smoking behavior. However, only 39% of parents are aware of their children smoking behavior. This study aims were determining the awareness of parents and its form on the smoking behavior of their teenage children after treatment. The design of this study was a pre-posttest experiment with control group design. Around 301 parents of 8th grade boy student from 7 junior high schools were considered respondents. The latter came from 2 locations namely Yogyakarta and Tabanan Bali. For determining the respondents, cluster random sampling was used. The respondents were grouped into 3 groups (X1 treatment group, X2 treatment group and control group). The treatment is to provide information about cigarettes and its danger. It was given once by health workers. The measured variable is the respondent awareness and its form that was obtained from the students using selfreported questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Kruskal Wallis and Chi-square test with 0.05 level of significant. The results showed that there was a significant increase the parental awareness after treatment (p value 0.0001). This can happen because the intervention strengthened the predisposing factor to realize the respondents’ caring behavior as well as the concept of behavioral determinant of LW Green. In the X2 treatment group (non-smoker respondents) showed a higher increase of parental awareness than X1 treatment group (smoker respondents) and control group. This happens because they get support from health workers and get healthy conditions as resulted from their behavior. They will continue to remain as nonsmokers and encourage their teenage children to look up to them in order to get a similar reward, as the law of effect theory by E.L Thorndike made it clear. The form of awareness that many parents chose is the message upholding the primary prevention. The conclusion of the research stresses on continuously fetching more knowledge about cigarettes and its dangers, as one of the best mechanisms that can increase the parental awareness against teenage smoking behavior.