Professor Sorenson explains that tobacco use in the population overall is probably around 20-21% right now in terms of prevalence.

Glorian Sorenson, Ph.D. is professor in the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Center for Community-Based Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She specializes in understanding how cancer interventions can be tailored for different audiences and different social setting. Here she describes an anti-smoking campaign that produced dramatic results in blue collar workers. “Tobacco use in the population overall is probably around 20-21% right now in terms of prevalence. So that means about 21% of the adult population overall uses tobacco. But if we look at how that varies across the population, we'll see huge differences. For some blue collar workers we would see prevalence rates of 35-40 percent, compared to maybe in some white collar or more educated populations of maybe under 10 percent. So there are very large differences, and that means that as we develop approaches to tobacco use cessation, we need to think about the audiences where messages around tobacco use have been least successful.”

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