title: School connectedness and daily smoking among boys and girls: the influence of parental smoking norms.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The objective was to test whether an association between school connectedness and smoking exists among Danish school children, and if so, to examine whether parental smoking attitude and parental smoking behaviour influenced this association.
  
  
  METHODS
  Data were collected by the Danish contribution to the cross-national study Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) 1998. Analyses were performed on questionnaire-based data from 1537 students at grade nine from a random sample of schools in Denmark.
  
  
  RESULTS
  An independent inverse association was found between school connectedness and smoking among both boys and girls. Parents' attitude to their children's smoking significantly modified this association among boys. Among girls the modifying effect was less marked. Neither among boys nor girls did parental smoking behaviour significantly modify the association between school connectedness and smoking, although a modifying tendency was observed among girls.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The smoking behaviour of Danish adolescents may be influenced by complicated interactions of varying sets of experienced smoking norms, and any research project or preventive programme focusing on the influence of school life on adolescent smoking behaviour needs to consider the family smoking norms. Additionally, the results stress the important role of gender by indicating that the smoking behaviour of girls may be more sensitive to restricting social influences than the smoking behaviour of boys.
authors.affiliation: University of Copenhagen, Institute of Public Health, Department of Social Medicine, Copenhagen, Denmark. M.Rasmussen@socmed.ku.dk
authors.forename: Mette
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rasmussen
authors.forename: Mogens T
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Damsgaard
authors.forename: Bjørn E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Holstein
authors.forename: Lis H
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Poulsen
authors.forename: Pernille
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Due
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003718:Denmark / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D012574:Schools; D012907:Smoking / Q000453:epidemiology*; D012927:Social Control, Informal; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires