Abstract
BackgroundEducational disparities in daily smoking begin during adolescence and can lead to educational disparities in health among adults. In particular, vocational students including apprentices have higher daily smoking rates compared to non-vocational students. This study aimed to identify the determinants of the gap in daily smoking between French apprentices and high school students aged 17 in 2008 and in 2017.MethodsWe used data from a cross-sectional repeated survey representative of all French adolescents aged 17 in 2008 and 2017. We conducted a non-linear extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique and included the following variables: sociodemographic and familial characteristics, parental smoking, cannabis and alcohol use, suicidal attempt, grade repetition and money received.ResultsDaily smoking was about two times higher among French apprentices compared to high school students in 2008. This gap did not decrease between 2008 and 2017. Differences in measured characteristics between the two groups explained this gap partly, from 28.6 to 51.2%. Cannabis and alcohol use, money received and parental smoking contributed the most to the daily smoking gap.ConclusionsPrevention programs could target cannabis and alcohol use as well as parental smoking to help decrease educational disparities in smoking status among French adolescents.
Highlights
Educational disparities in daily smoking begin during adolescence and can lead to educational disparities in health among adults
Despite encouraging decreases in smoking prevalence, educational disparities in smoking have increased in the past decades in many Western countries [1], notably in France [2, 3]
The ESCAPAD survey is conducted by the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and the Department of National Civil Service and Youth during the National Defence and Citizenship Day (JDC): a one-day session of civic and military information that is compulsory for later enrolment in public exams
Summary
Educational disparities in daily smoking begin during adolescence and can lead to educational disparities in health among adults. Chyderiotis et al BMC Public Health (2020) 20:924 vocational students in various Western countries [8,9,10,11,12] This could result from differences between students in characteristics such as family socioeconomic status, personal and family difficulties [7]. This could arise from some specificities of vocational training such as a closer proximity with the adult-type lifestyles and the professional environment, often in manual employment where, in France, smoking rates are high [3, 13], and higher financial resources [14]. Said differently, such decomposition technique quantifies the potential reduction in the disparity for a given outcome between two groups under a hypothetical scenario where both groups would have the same value for each covariate of interest
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