Influences of stress, personality and social support on smoking behaviors among adolescents

Objective To examine smoking prevalence and the impacts of stress, personality and social support on smoking behaviors among adolescents and to provide references for prevention and control of smoking behavior among the youths.Methods Totally 2 380 junior and senior students aged 12-18 years were recruited with stratified random cluster sampling from 6 high schools in Zhangjiajie, Changde, and Yueyang city of Hunan province and Qingyang city of Gansu province and surveyed with Adolescent Life Events Questionnaire(ALEQ), simple version Big Five Personality Inventory(NEO-FFI), Perceived Social Support Scale(PSSS), and a self-designed smoking behavior questionnaire between October to December 2014.Results There were significant between-gender difference(χ²=152.52, P<0.05) and between-grade difference (χ²=84.75, P<0.05) in smoking behavior among the adolescents, with obviously higher smoking rates among the boy and senior students compared to those among the girl and junior students.Compared to the non-smoking students, the smoking students had significantly different scores for stress, social support, and openness to experience and agreeableness dimensions of personality(all P<0.05).The results of logistic regression showed that gender(odds ratioOR=8.39), stress(OR=1.02), social support(OR=0.99), and personality dimensions of openness to experience(OR=0.97), agreeableness (OR=0.95) and conscientiousness(OR=0.96) were predictors of smoking among the adolescents.Conclusion The male adolescents with low social support, low scores for openness to experience and agreeableness, and high score for conscientiousness are more likely to smoke when they face pressure.