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Age and Gender Differerences In a Social Process Model of Adolescent Cigarette Use *
Author(s) -
Skinner William F.,
Krohn Marvin D.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
sociological inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.446
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1475-682X
pISSN - 0038-0245
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-682x.1992.tb00183.x
Subject(s) - cigarette smoking , path analysis (statistics) , psychology , longitudinal study , affect (linguistics) , developmental psychology , demography , age groups , social psychology , sociology , medicine , statistics , mathematics , communication , pathology
This study examines how age and gender influence the ability of social process theory to explain adolescent cigarette use. Differences in the causal effects of social process variables for three age periods for male and female adolescents are examined. Longitudinal data from a sample of midwestern adolescents are analyzed using path analyses procedures. Findings from these analyses indicate that social process theory is better able to account for cigarette use among older females than any other age and gender group. For females, commitment to education and school activities were better predictors of cigarette smoking at a later age than an earlier age, whereas the opposite was found for belief in conventional societal rules. For males, previous smoking was the major variable in all three age groups to directly affect subsequent smoking. These findings are discussed in terms of previous age and gender research.