Smoking in Adolescence

What factors influence adolescents to take up smoking? Why do more girls smoke than boys? In contrast to medical orthodoxy, Smoking in Adolescence looks at smoking from the adolescents' own points of view. What emerges is that regular smokers are seen as fun-loving and nonconformist; cigarettes are a passport to a fashionable, popular and 'hard' identity. Young people create, and are influenced by, complex images of smokers and nonsmokers. Barbara Lloyd and Kevin Lucas explore the psychological dimensions such as social environment, family, peers, stress and coping, body image, mood and pleasure. They suggest how anti-smoking interventions should be re-evaluated to take account of this new evidence throughout the school curriculum. Smoking in Adolescence will be of practical interest to teachers, youth workers, health professionals and parents as well as students of psychology.

Chapter 1 'Problem behaviour', sensation seeking and the concept of risk; Chapter 2 Studying adolescent smoking; Chapter 3 Two empirical studies of adolescent smoking; Chapter 4 The social environment; Chapter 5 Social environments; Chapter 6 Smoking and mood; Chapter 7 Smoking and image formation; Chapter 8 Social identities of adolescent smokers; Chapter 9 Interventions; Chapter 10 Breaking the mould;