Cigarette smoking in multicultural, urban high school students

Abstract

Purpose: To profile patterns of cigarette use among a multiethnic population of high school students, and identify important factors associated with cigarette use by ethnicity, in order to plan effective health promotion strategies.

Methods: This cross-sectional study involved the completion of a lifestyle questionnaire by 1236 Grade 9-13 students (86% response rate) from 62 randomly selected classrooms in three urban high schools in Toronto. Chi-square analysis of the association between tobacco use and other variables took account of the clustered sample using CSAMPLE in Epi Info.

Results: The students self-identified their ethnicity as follows: 388 Canadian, 269 European, 171 East Indian, 137 Asian, 76 West Indian, and 194 "other." Students who identified themselves as Canadians were significantly more likely to be current smokers (29%) than students reporting other ethnicities (13%). There was no apparent increase in smoking rates for immigrants after 2 or more years in Canada. Current drinking, sexual activity, and especially friends smoking was most strongly associated with current smoking for most ethnic groups, although the relative importance of these variables was not identical for all groups.

Conclusions: Prevention programs may benefit from a focus on the influence of peer smoking and on the grouping together of lifestyle factors associated with smoking for students in all ethnic groups in this multicultural city.