Family life and smoking in adolescence

The paper examines the relationship between perceptions of family life and smoking behaviour, using questionnaire survey data from a Scottish longitudinal study of adolescent socialization and lifestyles. Recent research has established links between adolescent health behaviours and family life, where the home environment is characterized in terms of young people's perceptions of parental support and control. The present study extends this approach, and also takes account of other important aspects of the home environment, including socio-economic circumstances and make up of the family. Perceptions of family support were found to be inversely related to smoking, with an "unsupportive" home environment associated with increased likelihood of smoking. In addition, smoking prevalences were raised where perceptions of poor support were combined with reports of fewer controls (i.e. "neglectful" parenting). More detailed multivariate analysis showed that the effects of perceived family life on smoking were felt independently of the socio-economic circumstances of the family, as characterized by neighbourhood deprivation and parents' social class. The picture was different for family structure, however, with smoking prevalences uniformly raised among adolescents from loneparent or reconstituted households, irrespective of perceptions of parenting practices. The paper concludes by discussing the potential significance of associations between family life and health behaviours for the production of class based health inequalities in youth through processes of indirect social selection.