Young people are more strongly influenced to start smoking by family members with a habit than they are by peer pressure, research revealed.
An 11-year study into young people’s attitudes towards smoking found that 99% of regular young smokers lived with at least one smoker, while less than 15% said they had ever felt under pressure to take up cigarettes.
The research, The Liverpool Longitudinal Study on Smoking , was carried out for the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation and the report can be downloaded here.
The report finds:
Health education had clearly had an impact on some of the adolescents in the group and had acted as a deterrent to them smoking. Thus maintaining a health promotion strategy would continue to be beneficial. However, for the smokers in the group the messages have not been successful in preventing them from smoking. This suggests that additional initiatives are needed to deter this group from smoking.
The authors suggest that in addition to health education more needs to be done to tackle parental smoking, to bring home the impact that their smoking has on their children, and to work on socio-economic and environmental issues and to make sure that schools have strong smoking policies.
It examines the different motivations for those that had smoked and those who had not. For those that had curiosity was apparently key, where as for those who did not the motivation came from a desire to stay healthy:
The overwhelming reason given by the young people in the group who had not smoked, and did not intend to smoke in the future, was health. For many this was about long-term health and fear of getting cancer or heart disease. This indicated that health promotion messages had succeeded with a certain proportion of the group. The focus was on remaining healthy ‘now’, so that they could focus on a particular career, for example playing football.
Interestingly peer pressure isn’t cited as a significant influence:
It was clear that friends were an important influence on smoking uptake in that in each year of the study over 80% of first time triers got their first cigarette from a friend. Moreover a similar figure smoked this cigarette with a friend and not on their own. However, what became evident was the extent to which the young people saw this ‘influence’ as important was not as significant as the issue of personal decision making.
As the report on the Channel 4 website suggests parental smoking was an important factor in young people’s smoking behaviour. However, young people while seeing how difficult it was for parents to quit smoking didn’t seem to think they would find it as hard:
As a result the participants knew it was hard for parents and adults generally to quit, but did not feel that they would find it as difficult because they had not been smoking for that long. Hence the smokers in the group did not consider being able to stop smoking a problem.
The study says that young people’s knowledge about the health risks associated with smoking is high. But:
Significantly across all years of the study between 60%-70% of the pupils who had tried a cigarette had known someone who was suffering from, or had died from, a smoking related illness. This figure is likely related to the fact that familial smoking is strongly linked to adolescent experimentation, so the young people were more likely to be exposed to people who would be suffering from such an illness.
Filed under: tobacco , Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation
