Assessment of People’s Attitudes Towards Smoking

Abstract

A practical, thought-provoking quit-smoking advertising campaign can change smokers' attitudes toward smoking and even encourage them to quit. The anti-smoking video that uses guilt appeal and surprise appeal can encourage quitting behavior and thus persuade smokers to make changes. This pre-test/post-test survey used Qualtrics to examine whether the adults over 18 who smoke/vape (N=55) after watching the video could assess people's attitudes toward smoking. In this study, we used t test method to calculate whether the chosen advertisement was persuasively effective. The calculated result indicates that there was a negative attitude change in the designed persuasive messaging. The insufficient attitude change by using video messaging can have various reasons. The participants, mostly young people under 25 and without children, were untouched by the strategies used in the ads. On another hand, guilt appeals may cause the smokers to feel shame and thus have a negative perspective towards the ads.