Professor Sorenson explains how surveys were conducted to elucidate how diferent programs elicite a varied response amongst blue collar workers to quit 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. “So what we did was we randomly assigned the work sites, we surveyed the workers at the beginning to see what were the rates of tobacco use or other health behaviors, we offered the programs within all of the sites, and then at the end – after about 18 months – we did another survey to look at changes in health behaviors. And then compared that between the two groups, the group only getting the health promotion and the group getting health promotion and health protection. And what we found was that for blue-collar workers in the integrated group, they were twice as likely to quit smoking as blue-collar workers in the group that got only the health promotion piece.”

Harvard School of Public Health