Life Styles of European School Children: Findings of the WHO Cross National Study on Health-related Behaviour

During informal discussions held by some participants in the First European Conference on Tobacco and Youth (Venice, 1981), the lack of comparable data on the consumption of tobacco in European youth became evident. The reason for this was clear; surveys on this subject which had been carried out up until that time in some European countries, did not share a common methodology. It was there that the idea was suggested of periodically carrying out an international study with representative samples of all the school-children in the participating countries, on tobacco consumption and other forms of health-related behaviour. The methodology to be used had to allow comparable results to be obtained, both between the countries taking part in the same edition of the study, and over the course of successive editions.