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In this repository, I provide the source of the data and the code leading to the results described below.
While the association between parental smoking and children's smoking has been described elsewhere, differences in family structures and dynamics in Africa, such as the extended nature of most families, may influence the impact of parental smoking on students' smoking. This study aims to examine the impact of parents' smoking behavior on students’ smoking habits, using the most recent school-based survey in Senegal.
We used the publicly available 2020 Senegal Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS), a cross-sectional survey conducted between January and December 2020 by the National Tobacco Control Program of Senegal. Our outcome of interest was students' current cigarette smoking habits as a binary variable, and the predictor was parents’ current smoking habits. Additional covariates include friends' smoking habits, student sex, grade, weekly pocket money, and parents' employment status. We utilized descriptive statistics and weighted logistic regression for the association between parents’ smoking and students’ smoking.
Among the total sample of 3,723 students, 11.04% (unweighted n = 402) reported being smokers, while 88.96% (unweighted n = 3,321) reported not smoking. In the crude model, students with at least one smoking parent had nearly twice the odds of smoking compared to those with no smoking parent (OR = 1.93, p-value = 0.0001). This association remained significant in the multivariate model after adjusting for whether the student had at least one friend who smokes, students’ sex, grade, pocket money, and parental work status (adjusted OR = 1.59, p-value = 0.0082).
In this study, we found that despite structural differences in family composition between Western and African contexts, parental smoking remains a significant predictor of students’ smoking behavior, emphasizing the need for including parents in smoking-prevention programs targeted at students.