What factors influence adolescents to take up smoking? Why do more girls smoke than boys? In contrast to medical orthodoxy, Smoking in Adolescence looks at smoking from the adolescents' own points of view. What emerges is that regular smokers are seen as fun-loving and nonconformist; cigarettes are a passport to a fashionable, popular and 'hard' identity.
Young people create, and are influenced by, complex images of smokers and nonsmokers. Barbara Lloyd and Kevin Lucas explore the psychological dimensions such as social environment, family, peers, stress and coping, body image, mood and pleasure. They suggest how anti-smoking interventions should be re-evaluated to take account of this new evidence throughout the school curriculum.
Smoking in Adolescence will be of practical interest to teachers, youth workers, health professionals and parents as well as students of psychology.

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'In short, Lloyd and Lucas' approach is challenging in its emphasis on a 'positive' and holistic orientation to health and always humane in its emphasis on quality of life and, in the authors' words, 'the indivisibility of the individual from society' "-Professor Keith Tones

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Health Promotion is a major focus of government policy and an expanding area of practice involving a range of public health professionals. At the same time, there is much debate about what is meant by "health" and the best strategies for improving, developing and promoting it. In light of these debates, Health Promotion offers a major reappraisal of health promotion activity, examining the evidence for what actually works and highlighting issues for improving efficacy.

The field of health promotion has traditionally drawn from diverse fields including health psychology, epidemiology, political science and educational theory. The authors argue that the effect of this has often been an unhelpfully fragmented view of people and their health. They propose an alternative, more integrated view as means of better understanding people and for making public health strategies more effective.

Health Promotion: Evidence and Experience makes thought-provoking reading for all those involved in public health and those with an interest in finding new ways to improve health outcomes.