Young people, gender and smoking in the United Kingdom

Over the last decade, gender has emerged as a significant differentiatorof smoking prevalence among young people in developed countries.Some attention has also been given to gender difference.s inmotives for taking up smoking. Compared to recent work on adultsmoking, the literature on smoking among young people has failedto take up the challenge of the analysis of gender differencesto highlight an interpretation of young people's smoking asa rational response to material and social pressures. This paperdraws mainly on questionnaire data from an ongoing UK studyof Adolescent Health and Parenting to outline an alternativeto the usual health education approach to young people's smoking.in this alternative model, the main factors associated withyoung people's smoking are material circumstances, life satisfactionand stress, including dissatisfaction with parental relationships,and peer sociability. Smoking is associated with poor reportedhealth status. The relationship between social factors and smokingin young men and women shows some significant differences, withyoung women being significantly more likely to smoke for stress-relatedreasons. Qualitative materialfrom a follow-up interview studyis indicative of the processes underlying the statistical associationsfound in the questionnaire