In March 2011, the New Zealand Government committed to a goal of New Zealand becoming ‘smokefree’ by the year 2025, where less than five percent of the population smokes. One strategy towards meeting this goal is to reduce the availability of tobacco in New Zealand (The New Zealand Government, 2011). The Health Promotion Agency’s (HPA’s) Youth Insights Survey (YIS) monitors Year 10 students’ behaviours, attitudes and knowledge on a range of tobacco-related topics, including about their opinions on the sale of tobacco.
Methodology
To regularly monitor young people’s opinions about tobacco control and aid the development of appropriate health promotion strategies, respondents in the 2012 YIS answered a question about their opinion on the sale of tobacco in New Zealand.
Responses to this question were examined by:
• smoking status
1.never smoked
2.current smokers (smoke at least monthly)
3.ex (no longer smoke) and experimental (smoke less often than monthly) smokers
•susceptibility to smoking
1.non-susceptible never smokers (who said they would ‘definitely not’ accept a cigarette offered by their best friend or smoke a cigarette during the next 12 months)
2.susceptible never smokers
•ethnicity
•gender.
When looking at the differences by ethnicity and gender we have controlled for smoking status. This means that we take into account whether or not a respondent smokes, to ensure that any differences found by ethnicity or gender are not in fact due to the respondent’s own smoking status.
Key Results
- More than half (57%) of young people agreed that cigarettes and tobacco should not be sold in New Zealand.
- Young people who had never smoked and were not susceptible to taking up smoking were the most likely to agree that cigarettes and tobacco should not be sold in New Zealand.