The Association Between School Bonding and Smoking Amongst Chilean Adolescents

ABSTRACT

Background: The objective of the research was to study the association between school bonding dimensions (school commitment and school attachment) and current adolescent smoking in Chile, controlling for confounding variables using the fifth Chilean School Population National Substance Use Survey, 2003 (CHSS-2003) data set. Methods: The CHSS-2003 is a stratified cross-sectional survey that gathers information about personal, familial, peer, and school factors and cigarette use using a self-reported questionnaire. Complete data from 21,956 adolescent students for all the variables of interest were used in the analyses. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed in order to explore the construct validity of the questionnaire and create the main exposure and potential confounding variables. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were undertaken to study the association between school bonding and smoking. Results: The construct validity of the school attachment and school commitment scales was mainly supported by the EFA. Multivariable analyses showed strong evidence that, after adjusting for factors from different domains, school commitment (student's good grades and school attendance) appears to have a clear inverse association with current smoking (odds ratio [OR] = 0.46, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.38–0.56). On the other hand, school attachment (their feelings towards their school and their teachers) was not associated with adolescent smoking (OR = 1.16, 95% CI: 0.88–1.53). Conclusions: School commitment was strongly associated with current smoking. It is important to further study this variable with the aim of ascertaining whether or not interventions that improve school commitment may prevent or reduce smoking amongst adolescent students.

Keywords:

• Smoking
• adolescents
• school bonding
• school attachment
• school commitment

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge to CONACE (Consejo Nacional para el Control de Estupefacientes) for providing access to the dataset of the Fifth Chilean National Survey on Substance Use in Schools.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Jorge Gaete conceived the research idea and the design, performed the data analyses, interpretation, and writing. Ricardo Araya contributed to the research conception and design, and reviewed the analyses and the writing. Alan Montgomery reviewed the analyses and the writing.

Funding

This research was part of Jorge Gaete's PhD degree at the University of Bristol. The PhD study was funded by Alban Scholarship (European Union), Beca Presidente de la República de Chile (Chile), and Universidad de los Andes Scholarship (Chile). The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.