The Age of Smoking Initiation

The age of smoking initiation has dropped over the past four decades. Since behaviors and attitudes adopted in late childhood or early adolescence predicts future smoking, it is important to understand the smoking and other risk-taking behaviors and attitudes of children aged 12 and younger. There supports the idea of early identification and targeting of children at high risk of smoking in middle school, possibly as early as grade seven.

2-AIM OF THE STUDY

a- There is a need to amicably evaluate such knowledge, attitude as well as behavior of school children in Oman those in 9th and 12th grade and inform them with regards to the consequences of smoking mostly affecting their health conditions; b- There is utmost goal for describing substantial affective factors associated with the presence of smoking among school children (grades 9 and 12) in Oman that can be through school and health campaigns showing the students that smoking is really dangerous to their health

3-MATERIAL AND METHODS

Material

There will be usage of questionnaire, the items in the main questionnaire need to be arranged in subscales to measure the prevalence of smoking among students, and be able to evaluate students' knowledge as well as attitudes and beliefs with respect to smoking and its negative consequences. Once the final questionnaire is developed, it will be given to a panel of two experts to review such validity of content in the questionnaire. To pretest the questionnaire and check its construct validity, it must be given to 200 students (100 boys and 100 girls) with similar characteristics as core subject and to be reviewed by focus groups of school-age children and to be tested for reliability using the test-retest method in revealing revealed such correlation coefficient of