Epidemiological Studies Of Smoking Behavior Of Students In Beijing

Although tens of thousands of papers have been published on the health hazard of cigarette smoking, the world's tobacco consumption has been increasing continuously. In China, the situation is worse. According to Government statistics, tobacco production in China has been increasing at the speed of more than 10% annually since 1980. it has been estimated by experts from the tobacco industry that more than 50% of the world's tobacco is produced in China each year. The "1984-86 National Smoking Survey" data showed that 33% of all adults and more than 60% of male adults in China were regular smokers.Meanwhile, both the national survey data mentioned above and that from industrialized countries have shown that, most of the adult smokers began to smoke in their adolescent period. suggesting the importance of smoking begavioral modification of adolescents for the control of smoking among adults.To identify the current situation of smoking behavior and its risk factors on Beijing students as well as to provide a basis for the formulation of smoking control strategies in adolescents, a behavioral epidemiological study was carried out in Beijing from Hay to October, 1988.Subjects and Nethods 1. Target population: The target population was the 1,082 357 students in 4.812 schools in Beijing at different levels; of these people, 311,605 were 4-6th graders in 4,059 primary schools, 582,377 in 565 high schools, 52,401 in 120 vocational senior high schools and 135,974 in 68 universities.2. Sampling technique and sample population: The sampling method was a "Multiple-stepped Equal Probability Sampling Procedure" advanced by D.L. Tang, et al. in 1988, which is in fact a stratified cluster sampling method. AS the first step, the target population was classified into five groups according to school level: primary schools, junior high schools, senior high schools, vocational senior high schools and universities. Samples were then taken separately from each group. In the university group, all the 68 schools were categorized into 8 strata according to specialty. From each strata, a number of schools were randomly selected in accordance with the proportion of the number of students in each stratum to the total number of university students. From each of the schools thus chosen, a number of classes were selected in accordance with the principle of the method, and the final basic unit under study was class. In total 113 classes from 20 universities were thus selected The...