Efficiency of Anti-tobacco Campaign for Reducing Smoking Habit among North Western University Students, Bangladesh

Abstract

Smoking has broadened its impact severely in Bangladesh. To reduce the cruelty of tobacco or smoking use, there have been taken few necessary steps. Various rules and regulations have been set out; antismoking advertisements through pictorial or graphic health warnings are one of them. The objectives of the study were to assess the effectiveness of pictorial health warning based anti-tobacco advertisements and to assess their perceptions about antismoking advertisements. The study was a cross sectional in nature where quantitative approach was used. Through the purposive sampling method 128 samples size had taken from 687 populations. Primary data was collected by questionnaire survey through Google Form from undergraduate students of North Western University and the secondary data were collected through different books, journals, thesis paper, online materials etc. The collected data were analyzed by using SPSS, MS Excel and MS Word. Both smokers and nonsmokers were surveyed proportionately to measure their perception towards antismoking advertisements in cigarette packages and its effectiveness. This study shows that there is a little impact of health warnings labels in cigarettes packages as it reveals that nearly 62.5% of the smokers mentioned that they have lessened the frequency of taking cigarettes and 59.4% of nonsmokers stated that health warnings help them to refrain from smoking.