There was a decline in characters smoking in films from 1950 to 1990. Studying films in 2002, researchers from the American Academy of Pediatrics found the instances had reverted to 1950 statistics. A study of "popular films" released from 1988 to 1997 found that 87 percent of the films contained smoking onscreen or references to smoking and the most common onscreen participants were males who engaged in "risk-taking behaviors."
In the early 2000s, major-studio fare accounted for 90 percent of onscreen smoking. A 2006 project from the Chest Foundation found an increase during this time of stars in PG-13 fare lighting up, a departure from most scenes being featured in R-rated fare. The same study claimed Hollywood film studios were responsible for "delivering the most new adolescent smokers to the tobacco industry."
A New England study of youth, both established smokers and those who claimed to have never tried smoking, reported that all participants were more likely to respond positively to cigarette smoking after seeing it done in movies. The report assumes traits such as "toughness, sexiness and rebelliousness" are both appealing to adolescents and associated with modern film smoking, but does not state if the subjects were questioned about perceiving a correlation.
A 1999 study of 10- to 14-year-olds conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics examined the children's exposure to smoking scenes in movies and took into account a "wide range of other factors." The same group was interviewed throughout 2006-2007 to monitor their smoking status and found that those with the most exposure to movie smoking earlier in life were twice as likely as their peers to pick up the habit. Taking the other factors into account, the research findings claimed that 34.9 percent of the smoking had ties to early-life movie-going.
A similar experiment conducted through Dartmouth Medical School and published in 2003 found smoking in movies to be responsible for 52.2 percent of smoking initiation. Details of the study were published, included criteria for choosing subjects for the follow-up rounds. The selected subjects also had to have seen a majority of the films targeted by researchers. Also listed are variables that could "confound the association between movie exposure and adolescent smoking initiation," including child and parent characteristics and social influences. The study says their findings also support the belief that likeliness to start smoking increases with greater exposure to seeing smoking in the movies.
The research has been met with some skepticism, including Reason Magazine`s Jacob Sullam questioning the Dartmouth study led by Madelline Dalton. Smoking advocate Sullam says, "Predicts is not the same as causes, and correlation is not the same as causation. That is why Dalton and her colleagues use cautious phrases."