In 1996 and 1999, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) conducted two longitudinal surveys designed primarily to study the roles of tobacco marketing and of parenting in the smoking uptake process among adolescents.

Both were based on the California Tobacco Survey (CTS), which has measured various aspects of smoking among California residents every two to three years since 1990.

Key Findings

Among the key findings of the first study (ID# 028042):

• Tobacco promotional activities are causally related to the onset of smoking.
• Susceptible nonsmokers are at least twice as likely to become future smokers as non-susceptible never smokers.
• One possible mechanism through which tobacco advertising and promotions may encourage adolescents to experiment is by minimizing the adolescent's perceptions of the risks of smoking.

Among the key findings of the second study (ID# 035086):

• Adolescent "never smokers" who preferred movie stars who smoked on- and off-screen (who were also favorites of adolescent "ever smokers") were significantly more likely to have initiated smoking.
• Low parental monitoring of adolescent smoking, weak parental expectations against smoking and amount of time spent outside the home were independently associated with adolescents ever smoking.
• About half of all parents correctly classified their adolescents' smoking status.
• Adolescent ever smokers who perceived that their parents relapsed from nonsmoking to smoking because of benefits from smoking were eight times more likely to be established smokers than those who perceived that their parents were too addicted to quit.

After the Program

RWJF made two subsequent related grants to support the work of the project director:

• Program ID# 039098 supports additional data analysis of the longitudinal study, with a focus on understanding the impact of adult and parental smoking behavior on youth smoking behavior.
• Program ID# 044244, awarded in 2001, supports a six-year follow-up of the birth cohort of California adolescents first interviewed in 1996 and again in 1999.

The findings of the principal investigator's RWJF-funded studies were important to RWJF's authorization of a new national program, Partners with Tobacco Use Research Centers: Advancing Transdisciplinary Science and Policy Studies, which is a component of a program launched by the National Cancer Institute/National Institute on Drug Abuse to apply and integrate advances in molecular biology, neuroscience, genetics and behavioral science to the challenge of tobacco control. (See Program Results for more information.)

Also following the 1999 study, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a major five-year grant to UCSD to fund randomized controlled trials of parenting interventions in reducing the incidence of smoking in adolescents.

Funding

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) supported the study with two grants from February 1996 to May 2001.