High-minority schools have lower smoking risk than mostly white schools; competitive schools have higher smoking risk than others
Media Contact: Michael Smart, (801) 378-7320
PROVO, Utah -- A new study shows that schools attended by predominantly minority students appear to provide a learning environment that effectively discourages minority adolescents, especially blacks, from smoking.
And that same study might draw a double-take from parents shelling out tuition to send their children to elite schools -- it also found that students at academically competitive schools are more likely to begin smoking than students with comparable levels of achievement at less competitive schools.
"We're seeking to understand the kinds of social situations that lead many adolescents to take up cigarette smoking, or avoid it, in the first place," said principal author Robert A. Johnson, senior research scientist at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, who published the findings with John P. Hoffmann, an associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, in the current issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Culling data from a national survey of more than 30,000 teen-agers conducted in the late 1980s, with follow-up surveys through 1994, the researchers statistically tested the influence of various factors on smoking. They focused on the common characteristics of students who identified themselves as non-smokers at the survey's inception, but had begun smoking daily by the first follow-up two years later.
"We were able to factor out individual and family-level influences and then look at the separate effect of the school," said Hoffmann. "We've isolated the school effect down to two very interesting outcomes."
Schools with more minorities deter smoking
The research showed that the higher the percentage of minorities in a school, the lower the risk of smoking among minorities. Since minority adolescents as a group smoke at lower rates than whites, this finding might not appear noteworthy by itself, but Johnson and Hoffmann went one step further and accounted for other factors like ethnicity, family situation and economic status. Even when a minority teen might be more prone to smoking because of various individual risk factors like poor school performance or living with a single parent, the school can still positively influence his or her behavior.
"We created a statistical image of an average teen, controlling for all other factors, and if you put that teen in a high-minority school, the risk of starting smoking is going to be lower than in a school with more whites," Hoffmann explained. "The minority teens who are attending high-minority schools have a protective effect against initiating cigarette smoking."
Although the researchers did not conduct cause-and-effect experiments, Johnson attributed the effect of minority schools to the attitudes of black and other minority adolescents.
"Troubled white adolescents often take up cigarette smoking to express their opposition to individuals or institutions that have rejected them or that, in their view, have treated them unfairly," said Johnson. "Black adolescents have less need to take up smoking because identifying oneself as a black in American society is often a potent symbol of opposition in its own right. And blacks -- especially those in minority schools -- are more likely than white adolescents to find community support for their feelings of opposition to society."
Competitive schools have a higher risk of smoking
The researchers also found that students at highly competitive schools are more likely to take up smoking than students with similar levels of academic performance at less competitive schools, an effect that was especially strong among girls. They defined a school's competitive environment by examining factors like the number of teachers with graduate degrees and the ambitions of the students for higher education. Even after factoring potential mitigating factors like grade point average or family situation, the effect remained.
"Those are the schools where parents probably want to send their children, and yet children going there might have problems that we don't yet recognize, problems like cigarette smoking that have long term consequences," said Hoffmann.
Johnson explained that the frustration that accompanies what parents, teachers and students perceive as failure tends to be more intensely felt at schools that attach so much importance to achievement.
"Frustration and loss of self-esteem, more than anything else, cause many apparently privileged adolescents to take up cigarette smoking," he said. "Once again, cigarette smoking serves the adolescent's need to express an alternative identity that rejects the institutions that put him or her down."
Implications
With more than a third of teens who try smoking progressing to daily use, the researchers hope the study, funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, can be a starting point for new approaches to helping teens avoid ever starting in the first place.
"It's such an important health behavior to study because we've still got a quarter of the population smoking. We want to understand why teens are doing it," Hoffmann said. "We found that at least a couple of school factors do influence smoking in addition to families and other risk factors. So schools can make a difference."
Parents should look beyond simply emphasizing the long-term health risks of smoking when seeking to help their teens avoid smoking, urged Johnson, noting that many teens may have a view of life that doesn't place much value on longevity.
"We should regard adolescent smokers with as much sympathy and understanding as possible and should try to understand why an adolescent smokes from his or her own point of view," he said. "Sometimes it is not easy to understand because smoking is being used to express values and attitudes that the adolescent is unable or unwilling to express verbally. It can take an investment of time and effort by parents or other adults to figure out what the underlying problem is."
Contact: John Hoffmann, (801) 378-9298
Robert Johnson, (202) 223-6040
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