Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy
Open Access

Research Article

Smoking Susceptibility and its Predictors among Adolescents in China: Evidence from Ningbo City

¹Department of Global Health, George Washington University, USA

²Global Health Institute, Emory University, USA

³School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany, USA

⁴Department of Epidemiology, Tulane University, USA

⁵Department of Epidemiology, Emory University, USA

⁶Hubert Department of Global Health, Emory University, USA

⁷Ningbo Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China

⁸School of Public Health, Georgia State University, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Cheng Huang
Department of Global Health
George Washington University, USA
E-mail: chenghuang@gwu.edu

Received June 06, 2012; Accepted September 04, 2012; Published September 07, 2012

Citation: Huang C, Koplan JP, Liu J, Li C, Silvaggio J, et al. (2012) Smoking Susceptibility and its Predictors among Adolescents in China: Evidence from Ningbo City. J Addict Res Ther S8:004. doi:10.4172/2155-6105.S8-004

Copyright: © 2012 Huang C. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Susceptibility to smoking is a risk factor of actual adolescent smoking behaviors. This study aimed to estimate the rate of smoking susceptibility and its predictors in China with a sample of 4,695 junior high school students in Ningbo, China. Core questions from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) were adapted to the China context and administered to these students. The rate of smoking susceptibility, measured by “Do you foresee yourself taking up smoking in the next 12 months”, is 6.1%. Results from logistic regression suggested that among boys, adolescents’ health knowledge that smoking can cause lung cancer (OR=2.73), the belief that smoking can help people relax (OR=2.32), and self-report of never having seen anti-smoking information on campus (OR=1.80) predicted increased susceptibility to smoking. Conversely, the belief that boys who smoke are less attractive (OR=0.64), that parents will have a problem with their child smoking (OR=0.50), having no friends or classmates who smoke (OR=0.22), and not seeing teachers smoke in the previous week (OR=0.61) predicted decreased susceptibility to smoking. Findings for girls were similar. This study suggested the need for comprehensive programs aiming to improve family, peer, and school environments to decrease smoking susceptibility among adolescents.

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