Race, sex, and physician communication about tobacco as predictors of adolescent smoking trajectories in a primarily African American sample

Abstract

This study identified latent classes of adolescent smoking and examined race, gender, and physician communication (PC) as predictors of class membership. Data were drawn from five waves of a large (N = 3,049), diverse (82.9% African American) study. Several latent classes were identified: nonsmoker, quitter, early-onset escalating smoking, early-onset stable high smoking, late-onset smoking, and declining smoking. Males, Whites, and teens who received PC were more likely to be in classes with more smoking. Our study identified several youth smoking patterns and differences in smoking based on race, gender, and receipt of PC.

Keywords:

• Adolescent
• young adult
• smoking
• longitudinal
• growth mixture modeling
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 HL050723, L. Robinson, PI).