1st Edition

Smoking in Adolescence Images and Identities

By Barbara Lloyd, Kevin Lucas Copyright 1998

    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;

    Biography

    Dr Barbara Lloyd is Senior Research Fellow in Social Psychology at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Sex and Gender (1986, with John Archer)
    Dr Kevin Lucas is Health Promotion Policy Analyst with East Sussex, Brighton and Hove Health Authority, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex.

    'This book will be of interest to parents, teachers, youth workers, health educators and students of psychology' - Addiction Today

    'Smoking in Adolescence will be particularly useful for those new to the area. The mixture of graphs, simple summaries of findings, and quotations from the discussion groups, makes for an easy and informative read.' - Health Psychology Update

    '... recommended to anyone underaking academic research, with a responsiblity for health education or smoking policy development.' - Review in Youth & Policy, Issue 63, review by Melanie Eye, North Durham Health PR in Youth & Policy, Issue 63, review by Melanie Eye, North Durham Health Promotion Unit

    'Perhaps the most fascinating sections of the book are the chapters devoted to the more qualitative aspects of the study. In these sections we overhear young people in conversation about cigarette smokers and smoking and learn how smokers are perceived by adolescents of the mid 1990s.This book is strong of theory, evidence and the authors' reflections on the meaning of the evidence. That is quite enough for one book, and it can be recommended on that basis.' - Jenny McWhirter, University of Southampton Health Education No 6 1998