Recruiting adolescents into genetic studies of smoking behavior

The goal of this study is to describe the process of establishing a longitudinal cohort to study genetic, psychological, and social predictors of adolescent smoking. Parents of eligible adolescents were approached for their consent via mail. Seventy-two percent of parents (n = 1533 of 2120) provided a response regarding their teens' participation. Among those who provided a response, 75% (1151) agreed to allow their teen to participate in the research yielding an overall parental consent rate of 54%. Compared with parents who consented to their teens' participation, parents who declined were less educated (89% had greater than a high school education compared with 69% of those who did not provide consent), less likely to be Caucasian (68 versus 48%), and less likely to report having ever even experimented with smoking (71 versus 60%). The most frequently reported reasons parents gave for declining consent included lack of interest and confidentiality concerns. A logistic regression model predicting consent to participate revealed a significant race by education interaction, indicating that among Caucasian parents, those with an education beyond high school were over two times more likely to provide consent compared with Caucasian parents with a high school education or less (odds ratio = 2.43; confidence interval = 1.37-4.32, P = 0.003).