Could adolescents be the vehicle that transfers a no-smoking rule from school to home?

Introduction Banning smoking at home, schools, children’s playgrounds and indoor environments, constitutes an integral part of tobacco control efforts to prevent uptake of smoking among young teenagers. We aimed at exploring the role of teenagers as facilitators of change in enforcing a home no-smoking rule following school-based anti-tobacco programs and examining the effect of home no-smoking rule on teenagers’ intention to smoke. Methods A school-based intervention-control study was implemented during the 2016–2017 academic year among middle-school students in Athens, Greece. The experiential learning intervention was delivered using an interdisciplinary approach, bridging excerpts from ancient classical Greek myths and ancient classical literature, with their decoded archetypal symbols applied in a smoking and tobacco control paradigm. An anonymous selfadministered questionnaire was used at baseline, and at follow-up at 3 months to evaluate program effectiveness. A chi-squared test was used for categorical variables and a t-test for continuous variables. Cohen’s distance (d) was employed to examine the intervention effect size. A two-tailed p≤0.05 was considered statistically significant using IBM SPSS V.22. Results In all, 351 students participated. At baseline, 47.5% in the intervention group reported a home no-smoking rule and 86% indicated being unlikely to smoke, these increased to 61.3% (p=0.016) and 98.2% (p