Tobacco Use among Adolescents: Directions for Research

The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Household Smoking Patterns in Canada

This report uses data from a 1986 Labour Force Survey (LFS) smoking supplement to examine the relationship between education and smoking prevalence within Canadian households and the influence of parental smoking behavior on the smoking behavior of their children. The sample was a national probability sample of 14,469 households and 30,000 respondents.

Over one in two (54 %) Canadian children are exposed to the presence of at least one adult smoker in the household. Parents and children within lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to be regular smokers than their counterparts in upper socioeconomic groups. Children in lower socioeconomic households are three times more likely to be exposed to a family environment in which both parents smoke than children in upper socioeconomic level households. At all socioeconomic levels, there is a gradient in the smoking prevalence among youth and young adults according to parental smoking behavior.

The patterns of smoking within households suggest the possibility of increasing divergence in smoking rates between socioeconomic groups. The findings are discussed in terms of epidemiological and health promotion implications.

Rites of passage: smoking and the construction of social identity

The following article, based on a qualitative study of young women from a Melbourne suburb, is concerned with the role smoking plays in the presentation of social identity. These women, in their early teens, are viewed as being in the liminal or transitional phase of a rite of passage to adulthood. The passage to adulthood is attained with the construction of a social identity corresponding to popular notions of the feminine, which fall into the familiar categories of the bad and good woman. Smoking is one of the props in the stereotypical representation of the bad woman. Conventional anti-smoking health messages have little relevance for young women who have chosen such a social identity for themselves.

Adolescent cigarette consumption: the influence of attitudes and peer drug use

Predictors of tobacco consumption were investigated with path analytic techniques using household survey data from 1,093 teenagers aged 13-17. When current smokers are compared to past or never smokers, pro-tobacco attitudes are always the most important predictor variable followed by friends' use of marijuana and own use of marijuana, suggesting that pro-tobacco attitudes are responsible for maintaining tobacco consumption. We infer that peer illicit drug use has the greatest effect in taking up smoking because it is the most important predictor of past smoker status compared to never smoking and it does not appear as such an important predictor of current use compared to never smoker status. Pro-tobacco attitudes are a consequence of smoking rather than an influence upon taking up smoking.

The interaction of sociological and biological factors in adolescent cigarette smoking

This article considers the interaction of social and biological factors in the context of adolescent cigarette smoking. Parent and peer smoking are the sociological variables and testosterone is the biological indicator. The subjects are 212 males and females 12-14 years of age. The findings support the interaction model, suggesting that both sociological and biological factors are necessary for understanding adolescent smoking.