For instance, a recent comprehensive review of 64 adolescent smoking cessations studies showed that only 27 (42%) studies even reported ethnicity of subjects (Sussman & Sun, 2009). Even in this present review where smoking interventions targeted 50% or greater minority adolescents, three CAL-101 (23%; Joffe et al., 2009; Prokhorov et al., 2008; Sun et al., 2007) did not take into account culture specific values. These evidence indicate that although developing culturally sensitive tobacco intervention is a long-term goal, perhaps, the first viable goal is to start collecting more specific information like ethnicity/race, and other cultural values such as level of acculturation to begin to assess whether these programs are generalizable to ethnic/racial minority adolescents and whether culturally tailoring would improve intervention effects.

Another area for future research is tailoring tobacco interventions for African American youth; much to our surprise, there were few tobacco interventions for African American youth. This is surprising, given that the majority of culturally sensitive tobacco cessation interventions for adults were aimed at African Americans (Lawrence, Graber, Mills, Meissner, & Warnecke, 2003). Only one study (Kaufman et al., 1994) in this review tailored the intervention to adolescents in African American community. In order to better understand possible surface and deep structural changes that can be applied to tobacco interventions for African American adolescents, examining culturally tailored interventions to address other risky behaviors among African American youth may be informative.

For example, The Aban Aya Youth Project (Flay, Graumlich, Segawa, Burns, & Holliday, 2004), a prevention program for violence and substance use, incorporated cultural themes of self and cultural pride and family and community ties through storytelling and proverbs drawn from African and African American history and literature and homework assignments involving parents. Another drug prevention program targeting African American girls (Corneille, Ashcraft, & Belgrave, 2005) included cultural component that emphasized Afrocentric values, such as a sense of communalism and collectiveness, spirituality and connectedness to the past and future, as well as issues surrounding race and gender. These values were reinforced through team building and problem solving activities as well as music, poetry, and dance.

Taken from the adult literature, Kick It! Program (Resnicow et al., 1997), a self-help smoking prevention program developed for African American adult smokers used video stories about African American smokers as well as examples from Black history (e.g., Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X) to motivate quitting smoking. These cultural components can be used Entinostat as an initial guide to begin developing culturally tailored tobacco interventions for African American youth.