Trends - Smoking
Attitudes to cigarettes 1983-2007
The following is a summary of the report available from SHEU (£10 incl. p&p)
When looking over these many years of figures, we find that young people in recent years are...
* the last ten years show a rise in those young people reporting they have 'never smoked at all'
* over the years the older females have remained the 'heavier' smokers ranging from 12% (1987), 20% (1996) and around 15% in more recent years
* consistently reporting that around 50% of 14-15 year olds have a close friend that smokes regularly
* more than 50% of pupils lived in a home where somebody smoked regularly indoors
We also find that for the young people that smoke...
* Around 75% of smokers want to give up smoking, a proportion that has not risen despite anti-smoking campaigns and health education programmes
* 14-15 year olds are more likely, than in previous years, to have smoked at least 10 cigarettes in the past week
* they are more likely to smoke if family and close friends are smokers - 14-15 year old females are 8 times more likely to smoke if they have a close friend who smokes - but families may be the most important influence
* they are less likely to buy cigarettes from a shop than in previous years
SHEU is an independent research and publishing organisation. Each year the Schools Health Education Unit supports surveys in hundreds of communities nation wide and compiles the results from these surveys in the series ‘Young People in…’. The survey services began in the late 1970s and have been very widely used, and from the data bases from 1983 onwards we are publishing data to allow examination of trends.
Our annual survey sample is ‘accidental’ and not deliberate and is therefore not a representative 'national sample' in a research sense. It is however very large, and within any one community is never less than 40% of the community and often greater than 70%. The aim is to provide robust data for the community in which the data are collected and used. With the large sample it comes as no surprise to discover that Unit’s annual data compilations usually match the outcomes of orthodox procedures for the collection of 'national data'.
