Washington, Apr 2: A new study from University of Wisconsin has revealed that better-educated smokers are more likely to try kicking the butt in response to ‘quit-smoking’ TV ads.

The researchers interviewed 452 adult smokers of different socio-economic and educational levels about their recall of “keep trying to quit” and second-hand smoke ad campaigns.

The findings revealed that out of these 452 who recalled seeing the ads, 65 percent of college-educated respondents tried to quit in the following year, as compared with 30 percent of those with high school or lesser education.

However the researchers found that the effect of second-hand smoke ad campaigns was similar across educational levels.

For the keep-trying-to-quit ads, there was not a statistically significant difference between the groups restraining themselves from smoking after one year and their response to messages on second-hand smoke.

“About 7 percent of those with graduate degrees smoke in this country, while 46 percent of those with a GED light up,” said Jeff Niederdeppe, lead researcher and a post-doctoral fellow.

“Some media campaign messages appear less effective in promoting quit attempts among less-educated populations,” said the researchers.

Niederdeppe believes that income could also be a major contributing factor.

“Lower socio-economic status smokers may be more addicted and work in places where smoking is less restricted. They also have less access to abstinence aids such as medications and counselling,” he said.

“We are not doing a good enough job of providing lower socio-economic smokers with resources to help them quit,” he added.

Lirio Covey, Ph. D, the director of the psychiatry department at Columbia University Medical Centre and of the Smoking Cessation Program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute said that the study “signals the need to devote more public health attention and resources to understanding the continuing allure of smoking for persons of lower SES and the barriers to their efforts not only to begin to make attempts to stop smoking, but also to succeed when they embark on those attempts."

The study appears in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health. (ANI)