Learning Objectives: Understand better the influences on "social smoking" among youth
Abstract:
Problem/Objective:To examine relative prevalence of social smoking as ever smoking prevalence declined among adolescents who completed the California Healthy Kids Survey from 1998 to 2002.
Methods:Cross-sectional tobacco use data were collected from over 485,000 in-school California 7th, 9th and 11th graders via the California Healthy Kids Survey. Tobacco use variables included lifetime use, 30-day use, ever daily use for 30 days, and ever smoked 100+ cigarettes in lifetime. Social smoking was defined as having reported smoking daily (every day for 30 days) but now smoking only one or two cigarettes in the last 30 days.
Results:Across all grades, rates of ever smoking declined monotonically from 1998 to 2002 (17.8% to 9.5% (7th); 33.4% to 20.4%.(9th); 44.5% to 33.3% (11th)). Despite the drop in ever smoking from 1998 to 2002, the relative prevalence of social smoking was stable within grade, relative to other types of ever smoking. Across grades, however, the relative prevalence of social smoking compared to other types of smoking decreased from 8.8% (7th) to 6.6% (9th) to 4.8% (11th). Examination of covariates in analyses involving currently smoking ever daily smokers suggested that the following were positively associated with social smoking: ethnic minority status, getting good grades, being female, eating more fruit, exercising more regularly and (school-level:) urbanicity, larger size schools, and lower neighborhood income.
Conclusions:The prevalence of social smoking among current smokers appears to be associated with certain student-level and school-level factors but appears to be unrelated to changes in the overall prevalence of ever smoking among adolescents.
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