Professor Sorenson explains findings identifying that white-collar workers, in general, quit smoking at greater rates than blue-collar workers.

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. “There were no differences between groups in the white-collar workers, but we find that white collar workers, in general, quit at greater rates than blue-collar workers. But in this case we found that for those blue collar workers in the group getting the integrated message, they actually quit smoking at the same rate as the white-collar workers so one of the things we're taking away from that is that it's really important that we think about those occupational hazards as we're thinking about work-site health promotion. But it also tells us on a more global level that we need to understand some of the aspects of people's context of their day-to-day lives that would make interventions more relevant to them, and would address their health concerns in a holistic manner.”

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