Addressing Smoking Determinants to Reduce Alcohol Consumption: the Effects of a Transfer-oriented Curriculum

Abstract

Responding to the call for health interventions that address multiple health behaviors, we developed a transfer-oriented health curriculum for secondary schools. This curriculum explicitly addressed smoking, but it included principles from transfer-oriented learning theory, meaning that it aimed to transfer the skills and knowledge learned in the domain of smoking to other – unaddressed – health behavioral domains. An experimental study among 1107 thirteen and fourteen year old students indicated that the curriculum favorably impacted behavior in the unaddressed domain of alcohol consumption, but the mechanism through which those effects were achieved were unknown. Using regression analyses, the present article shows that the transfer-oriented curriculum strengthened the relationship between smoking determinants and alcohol consumption, allowing alcohol consumption to co-vary with positive changes in the addressed smoking determinants. By strengthening relationships between health behaviors, transfer-oriented health interventions can impact multiple health behaviors, and by doing so they have the potential to fulfill the need for more efficiency in health promotion practices.