Smoking behaviour in year 8 pupils: Baseline characteristics of the UK ESFA longitudinal study

Abstract

The vast majority of adult smokers take up the habit during adolescence and most continue to smoke for the rest of their lives. In order to reduce the prevalence of this highly health-compromising behaviour those factors which are associated with smoking in early adolescence need to be determined so that appropriate action can be taken.The study was part of the European Smoking Prevention Framework Approach (ESFA) project in which six European countries participated. In England 6626 young people (49.3% male, aged 12–13 years) from 42 schools were surveyed. Information was collected by means of a self-completed questionnaire.Nearly 14 per cent of the young people (884, 13.7%) were current smokers (smoke at least sometimes), with 5.4 per cent smoking at least once per week. Beliefs about smoking, social norms (friends think that the young person should smoke), social modelling (best friend, brother, sister smokes), perceived behaviour of others (young person estimates that at least half of friends or people the young person knows smoke), pressure from others (mother, sister, advertisements and friends) and leisure time activities (hanging out on the street with friends, going to house or rave parties) were all found to be independently associated with current smoking behaviour. In a separate gender specific analysis, few differences were observed between boys and girls at this age.The findings from this study suggest that smoking prevention and cessation activities need to be targeted not only at the individual child but also the wider community including the family.This cohort of young people will now be followed up over a period of three years, with half of the cohort being exposed to multi-level interventions.