Profesor Sorenson explains how studies were carried out to aid blue collar workers towards quitting smoking.

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. “We started to hear from blue collar workers – and we were doing different types of programs – that they would tell us things like, 'Why should I quit smoking when I'm just exposed to all these hazardous substances in the workplace? It really doesn't make any difference for me if I quit smoking.' So that told us that one of the things we that need to step back and think about were some of the occupational hazards that blue collars were facing. So we designed a series of studies where we looked at what would happen if we actually integrated messages around occupational health and safety with messages around tobacco. One of the studies, just to give you an example of the study design, we actually recruited worksites to the study. We recruited worksites, particularly those that were likely to employ a large number of blue collar workers – so manufacturing sites. And we randomly assigned 15 worksites, half of them to a group that just received a standard health promotion kind of a program where they receive tobacco and other kinds of messages – focused only on lifestyle behaviors. In the other group, the worksites got both messages around their health behaviors, as well as around occupational health and safety.”

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