Perceived Stress and Adolescents' Cigarette Use

Abstract

We surveyed 1,684 students from Grades 7 through 12 on their use of cigarettes and the types of circumstances they perceived as stressful. Students' smoking status was classified as either none, light, medium, or heavy use while over-all stress levels were either low, medium, or high. Nonsmoking boys had significantly lower over-all mean stress scores than all others while heavy users had significantly greater perceived stress scores than all other categories. Among girls, regular and heavy users reported significantly higher over-all stress scores than either nonsmokers or occasional users. Those items reported as causing the highest level of perceived stress among smoking boys were school work, money, and parents while among smoking girls the items were appearance, parents, and money.