TITLE:
Peer Pressure and Family Smoking Habits Influence Smoking Uptake in Teenage Boys Attending School: Multilevel Modeling of Survey Data
AUTHORS:
Shafquat Rozi, Sadia Mahmud, Gillian Lancaster, Nida Zahid
KEYWORDS:
Teenage Smoking, Multilevel Model, Binary Outcome, Public & Private Schools
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Epidemiology,
Vol.6 No.3,
August
10,
2016
ABSTRACT: Introduction: Among young teens, about one
in five smokes worldwide. Adolescents spend a considerable amount of their time
in school, and the school environment is therefore important for child health
practices and outcomes. Objectives: We aimed to investigate the impact on
smoking behavior of the school environment and the personal characteristics of
male teenage students attending schools in Pakistan, taking into account the
survey sampling structure. Methods: A two-stage cluster sampling with stratification
was employed, and we interviewed 772 male secondary school students. We adopted
random effect and generalizing estimating equation models. Results: Peer
pressure in particular had a strong influence on adolescents smoking; those
whose friends smoked were up to 6 times more likely to smoke. Family smoking
was also significantly associated with adolescents smoking, but those students
whose mother was educated were 50% less likely to smoke. The fitted random
effect model indicated that the between school variability was significant
(p-value