Relationships of Teenage Smoking to Educational Aspirations and Parents' Education / Ingrid Waldron and Diane Lye.

Past research has shown that teenagers with less educated parents and teenagers with lower academic aspirations are more likely than their peers to smoke. This study was conducted to provide additional descriptive data concerning the relationships of smoking to parents' education and students' educational aspirations and to provide preliminary evidence concerning causes of the inverse relationships between smoking and the education variables. Data were obtained for white high school seniors from the 1985 Monitoring the Future survey of high school seniors. The results revealed that students who had less educated parents or lower educational aspirations of their own were more likely to have tried a cigarette, more likely to have adopted cigarette smoking, and less likely to have quit smoking. These students also had more favorable attitudes toward smoking and reported greater acceptance of smoking by their friends. In addition, students with less educated parents or lower educational aspirations appeared to be more rejecting of adult authority and more predisposed to adopt adult behaviors, and these characteristics in turn were associated with smoking more. Multivariate analyses of these data, together with evidence from other studies, support the hypothesis that favorable attitudes toward smoking, social acceptance of smoking, and a tendency to adopt adult behaviors contribute to the higher rates of smoking among students with less educated parents or lower educational aspirations. (Author/NB)

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