Tobacco use among Pacific Islanders: risk-behavior surveys and data sets for the study of smoking behavior on Guam

To increase awareness of data resources from the Pacific Island of Guam, and their utility for research investigations of factors that encourage or discourage smoking among Pacific Islanders, and in turn, to produce empirical findings on tobacco use among Pacific Islanders to help fill data gaps on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) tobacco use for small AAPI populations.

Guam's 1995 and 1999 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data sets were selected, as well as its 1999 Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities Youth Risk Behavior System (YRBS) study, and a panel study of parental influences on risk behavior of middle school age youth conducted in 2000. Resultant sample sizes were 896 persons in 1995, and 506 in 1999. Guam's YRBS data sets are samples of middle school (grades 6-8) and high school youth (grades 9-12) in classrooms randomly sampled by grade level from both public and private schools. In 1999, a resultant sample of 589 high school students was obtained. In 2000, using the same sampling process as the YRBS studies but limited to public middle schools only, a specialized panel study obtained a sample of 270 middle school youth to study the influences of parents and peers on smoking and other risk behaviors.

Current smoking prevalence among adult Pacific Islanders (38 percent) on Guam is similar to other Pacific islands but comparatively high to US studies. In both 1995 and 1999, Pacific Islanders were more likely to be current smokers than other ethnic communities on island, and among those ever-smoking, they were less likely to have quit (i.e., report being former smokers). The same patterns of ethnic differences between Pacific Islanders, Asians, and non-API persons were consistently found among high school, and also middle school youth. These ethnic differences may implicate factors of tobacco accessibility, cultural definitions of "childhood," and adult role modeling, as contributing forces to smoking behavior on Guam.

Pacific island communities allow for studies of ethnic-cultural influences that are not masked by factors such as acculturation, socioeconomic status, the intensity of media advertising, or urban life and its attendant conditions of minority status that affect AAPI studies in the US mainland. For tobacco control advocates and AAPI scholars across the nation, data from Guam may prove useful for investigations of differences in lifestyles, cultural beliefs or practices, and environmental exposures that encourage or discourage smoking among AAPIS, and thus help to unravel the compounding interplay between factors.