Dealing with daily hassles: Smoking and African-American adolescent girls

Purpose: To examine cigarette use and its relationship to daily life hassle s in an urban sample of African-American adolescent girls. Methods: A sample of 105 African-American adolescent girls (mean age of 15. 45 years) derived from a larger cross-sectional research project titled "Fe male Adolescent Substance Experience Study" funded by the National Institut e of Drug Abuse comprised the sample. The sample was divided into adolescen ts who had ever smoked in their lifetime and adolescents who had never smok ed before. Student's t-tests were conducted to determine whether there were differences between these groups on demographic characteristics and the nu mber of daily life hassles. Pearson product moment correlations were also c onducted to examine the association between age of smoking initiation and n umber of hassles. Results: Less than 50% of the teenagers had ever smoked cigarettes in their lifetime, and of those who had ever smoked, the average age of initiation was 12.55 years (SD = 2.63). Furthermore, girls who had ever smoked, in con trast to girls who had never smoked, had a significantly greater number of daily life hassles, in general, and within the school/academic and family/e conomic domains in particular. Age of smoking initiation was negatively rel ated to the number of hassles, indicating that girls who started to smoke a t a younger age reported more hassles. Conclusions: These findings are discussed in terms of developing an underst anding of gender and ethnic-specific correlates of smoking that can be used tic) better delineate the developmental smoking trajectory of African-Amer ican girls. (C) Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2001.