Retail point-of-sale guardianship and youth tobacco purchases: A double-blind experiment using a factorial design

This factorial design study evaluates the attitudes and behavioral intentions of 458 undergraduate college students about intervening with the intent of preventing the illegal retail purchase of tobacco products by a minor after exposure to a factorial combination of three pieces of information. The objective is to determine if the main and interaction effects of these pieces of information have any significant effect on levels of retail point-of-sale guardianship.; Routine activities theory and the theory of planned behavior provide the framework for the analysis. Observations were recorded using ten-centimeter scale assessments via the Youth Tobacco Attitude Assessment instrument. Results were analyzed via descriptive statistics, MANVOA, and t tests.; The analysis indicates that most respondents are not very concerned by the observance of an illegal youth tobacco retail purchase of tobacco products and almost none reported that they would intervene with the intent of preventing the tobacco purchase. The results of the MANOVA showed that none of the treatment conditions, considered alone, were correlated with increased attitudes or behavioral intentions pertaining to retail point-of-sale guardianship. There was a significant interaction effect on attitudes when information portraying a potentially annoying situation was combined with information about the costs associated with youth tobacco use; F (1, 424) = 6.722, p = .010. Post-hoc independent groups t tests suggested that this effect was concentrated among non-tobacco using respondents; t (321) = -1.913, p = .057. There were no significant findings in the analysis for other control variables.; The study indicates that levels of retail point-of-sale guardianship held by undergraduate college student respondents highly are resistant to an information-based rational empirical change effort, although non-tobacco using respondents do seem to increase levels of concern under certain conditions.