Executive Summary
This report presents the efforts of the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center (WYSAC) to expand the analysis of the economic impact of smokefree ordinances in Wyoming on restaurant and bar revenues into a broader exploration of the economic, health, and social impacts of Wyoming’s comprehensive smokefree ordinances. We relied on previous research to guide our efforts in designing our expanded evaluation. After completing our review of the research and after determining the availability of data in Wyoming, we designed an evaluation plan that would more broadly assess the impacts of smokefree ordinances.
Our preliminary evaluation suggests that when compared to communities without comprehensive smokefree ordinances, communities with comprehensive smokefree ordinances demonstrate the following outcomes:
- Greater reductions in indicators of youth smoking prevalence
- the percentage of students having used cigarettes in their lifetime and the percentage of students having used cigarettes in the last 30 days
- Larger decreases in “undesirable” youth behaviors and attitudes toward smoking
- the percentage of students who have friends who have used cigarettes during the past year
- the percentage of students who feel it is not wrong at all or only a little wrong for someone their age to use cigarettes
- the percentage of students who perceive that getting cigarettes is easy
- the percentage of students perceiving that adults in their neighborhood would think it is not wrong at all or only a little bit wrong for kids to be smoking cigarettes
Our analyses did not show any significant differences in core adult smoking-related behaviors and attitudes between communities with and without comprehensive smokefree ordinances.
