School connectedness and daily smoking among boys and girls: the influence of parental smoking norms.
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.
Rasmussen
Mette
M
University of Copenhagen, Institute of Public Health, Department of Social Medicine, Copenhagen, Denmark. M.Rasmussen@socmed.ku.dk
Damsgaard
Mogens T
MT
Holstein
Bjørn E
BE
Poulsen
Lis H
LH
Due
Pernille
P
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