Television Advertisements and Their Effect on Deterring Youth from the Consumption of Alcohol: A Study of Secondary School Students in Eldoret

Abstract

Alcohol use and abuse is quite prevalent among young people in Kenya today. The drug has devastating consequences on the well-being of the young as well as that of other members of society. Although there are several factors that influence youth into alcohol use, television is the main factor in this study. The study sought to examine the impact of television in deterring alcohol use among the youth in Kenya. The study sought to investigate whether alcohol related information portrayed on television had the effect of deterring the youth from engaging in use of alcohol products .It also sought to establish the attitude of youth towards alcohol messages depicted on television. This study is based on Albert Bandura‘s Theory of Social Learning that discusses learning behaviour by direct experience or observation. The study is based on five selected public day secondary schools within Eldoret Municipality. The target population for this study was young people aged between 14-17 years. A Sample size of 260 was arrived at through simple random and purposive sampling. To obtain data, a structured questionnaire was administered to the youth while interview schedules were administered to five head teachers and five guiding and counseling teachers. Observation was used mainly for programmes and advertisements that portray alcohol and tobacco habits. The data is presented, analyzed and interpreted using both descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics is presented in form of frequencies percentages, tables and bar graphs.Chi-square was used to test hypothesis at ‹ 0.05 level of significance .It was found that young people were of view that television plays a greater role in encouraging rather than deterringalcohol use among youth.