Social influence on southern adolescents' smoking transition: a retrospective study.

The purpose of this study was to examine social factors that predicted adolescent smoking transition to more advanced stages of smoking behavior during a 3-year span. A national cohort sample of adolescents (N = 2,099) who participated in the 1989 and 1993 Teenage Attitudes and Practices Survey (TAPS I and TAPS II, respectively) was used for this study. The information obtained from this survey included measurements of smoking behavior and a series of factors related to smoking models in the respondents' social environment, such as smoking behavior of parents, siblings, and best friends. Results showed that the smoking behavior of an adolescent's best male friend was consistently associated with transition from nonsmoking to regular smoking and from experimental smoking to regular smoking. The most surprising finding was that the study showed no relationship between social influence and transition from nonsmoking to experimental smoking.