Cancer Control Research
5R03CA096467-02
Griffin, Kenneth W.
COMPETENCE SKILLS AND SMOKING AMONG SUBGROUPS OF YOUTH
AbstractDESCRIPTION (provided by applicant)
Contemporary school-based smoking prevention programs that combine refusal
skills training with techniques to enhance general personal and social
competence can be highly effective in reducing adolescent smoking. While
etiology research has shown that social resistance skills are important in
keeping young people away from smoking, little work has focused on how social
competence (e.g., assertiveness, communication skills) and personal competence
(e.g., cognitive and behavioral self-management skills) are protective in
terms of youth smoking. The etiological mechanisms remain particularly unclear
among youth in high-risk settings. Furthermore, national survey data show that
prevalence rates for adolescent smoking differ according to ethnicity, gender,
and geographic location. Thus it is important to determine if competence-based
etiological models can account for the initiation and escalation of adolescent
smoking among different subgroups of adolescents.
A primary goal of the proposed research is to develop, test, and refine
several etiologic models that focus on the role of social and personal
competence skills in adolescent cigarette smoking, and to examine these models
among two longitudinal samples of middle school students: a largely white,
suburban sample and a predominantly minority, inner-city sample. This goal
will be accomplished through secondary analysis of untreated control students
who participated in one of two school-based drug abuse prevention trials. The
proposed research aims to elucidate how competence skills influence the
initiation and escalation of cigarette smoking during the critical
middle-school years. For example, mediational analyses will examine the roles
of affective self-regulation and perceived social benefits of smoking as
factors that explain how poor competence leads to youth smoking; and
moderational analyses will examine whether good competence skills buffer the
effects of other salient risk factors for tobacco use. The hypothesized models
will be cross-validated among subgroups of the two longitudinal samples
including by ethnicity and gender. Because different etiologic factors may
contribute to varying levels of cigarette smoking, prediction of experimental
versus heavy smoking will be investigated among subgroups of students. Several
multivariate statistical techniques will be used including multiple linear and
logistic regression, structural equation modeling, and latent growth modeling.
The long-term goals are to improve our knowledge regarding the development of
tobacco use among youth of different backgrounds, and to ultimately refine and
improve smoking prevention programs for diverse youth populations.
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