Family structure, parent-child conversation time and substance use among Chinese adolescents

BMC Public Health

Research Article

G Neil Thomas¹  Sai-Yin Ho²  Kwok-Kei Mak²  Sarah M McGhee²  Tai-Hing Lam²  C Mary Schooling² 

[1] Department of Public Health and Epidemiology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK;School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;

关键词: Family Structure;    Adolescent Substance;    Parental Smoking;    Chinese Adolescent;    Intact Family;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-10-503

 received in 2010-02-01, accepted in 2010-08-19,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe family plays a vital role in shaping adolescent behaviours. The present study investigated the associations between family structure and substance use among Hong Kong Chinese adolescents.MethodsA total of 32,961 Form 1 to 5 (grade 7-12 in the US) Hong Kong students participated in the Youth Smoking Survey in 2003-4. An anonymous questionnaire was used to obtain information about family structure, daily duration of parent-child conversation, smoking, alcohol drinking and drug use. Logistic regression was used to calculate the adjusted odds ratios (OR) for each substance use by family structure.ResultsAdjusting for sex, age, type of housing, parental smoking and school, adolescents from non-intact families were significantly more likely to be current smokers (OR = 1.62), weekly drinkers (OR = 1.72) and ever drug users (OR = 1.72), with significant linear increases in ORs from maternal, paternal to no-parent families compared with intact families. Furthermore, current smoking (OR = 1.41) and weekly drinking (OR = 1.46) were significantly more common among adolescents from paternal than maternal families. After adjusting for parent-child conversation time, the ORs for non-intact families remained significant compared with intact families, but the paternal-maternal differences were no longer significant.ConclusionsNon-intact families were associated with substance use among Hong Kong Chinese adolescents. The apparently stronger associations with substance use in paternal than maternal families were probably mediated by the poorer communication with the father.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Mak et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.