Time Varying Effects of Family Environment on Adolescent Daily Smoking: Differences and Similarities Across Gender and Behavioral Disinhibition

Preventing an individual from becoming a regular smoker before the age of 18 is the number one factor affecting whether that person will go on to smoke as an adult. Family factors, including family smoking environment and family management have been identified as key mechanisms to target for adolescent smoking prevention. While adolescent smoking rates are at an all-time low a subset of teens continue to use cigarettes regularly (e.g., daily smoking) despite largely successful public health efforts. It may be that for persistent adolescent smokers known risk mechanisms work differently at different developmental periods. The current study examined the relationship between known familial environmental risk mechanisms (e.g. family management, family conflict and family smoking) on daily smoking in adolescence from age 10-19 and investigated if the relationships between the risk mechanisms and daily smoking differ across gender and behavioral disinhibition. A test and replicate strategy was employed to determine the reliability of findings.  

Participants were drawn from the Raising Healthy Children study (RHC, n = 1040), a community study of risk and protective factors related to substance use and delinquency and the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP, n=808), a 30-year longitudinal community sample. Analyses were performed using time-varying effects modeling (TVEM), which is an extension of spline regression that estimates continuous longitudinal effects between predictors and outcomes. TVEM tests for the stability of the relationship between family risk mechanisms and daily smoking during adolescence from ages 10 to 19 and can compare the strength of the association at different points in development across groups.

Preliminary results indicated a significant protective relationship between family management and daily smoking at ages 12-19. The protective relationship was significant for both boys and girls, but the strength of the association was greater for girls during early adolescents, such that greater family management was associated with a lower likelihood of being a daily smoker for girls compared to boys during this developmental window. Analyses are currently underway testing additional family risk mechanisms (family smoking environment and family conflict) and will test for group differences across behaviorally disinhibited and genetically at risk adolescents. Finally, replication analyses are underway in the SSDP longitudinal data set to determine consistency in model results.

Findings provide information about the optimal timing for delivery of family-centered preventive interventions for adolescent daily smoking among these persistent adolescent smokers who to date have been hard to impact with current public health efforts.