Tobacco and Alcohol Advertisements in Magazines: Are Young Readers Being Targeted?
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Oregon Health Sciences University
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Portland, Ore
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- advertising
- alcohol drinking
- smoking
- tobacco
To the Editor: As college and high school students, we were interested in previous research by Dr King and colleagues1 showing that cigarette brands popular among youths (aged 12-17 years) are more likely than other brands to be advertised in magazines that have high youth readership. Because the study did not include alcohol advertisements, we were motivated to extend some of the study's information.
Methods
We selected a convenience sample of 15 magazines listed by King et al1 that were available in our local public library. Eleven magazines had the highest youth readership (≥1.9 million readers) and 4 had the smallest number of young readers (≤0.8 million).2 We counted the number of pages of alcohol and tobacco advertisements to assess the volume of influence from the issue's sample (N=195), from July 1997 to June 1998. Based on our tally, we estimated the number of advertising pages devoted to …
