Smoking behavior in nine year old children: a replication and extension study

This study replicates and extends the results of our earlier findings which showed that 35% of children at age 9 had experimented with cigarettes for various reasons. Seven hundred eighty-seven children from the earlier sample and 361 children from the current sample participated in this study. Forty-one percent of the current sample had puffed a cigarette, 18% had tried it in the last year, 6% in the last 4 weeks and 3.5% in the last week. The study also showed that children who had puffed a cigarette had a significantly positive attitude towards smoking when compared with children who had not experimented with cigarettes. The puffers believed smoking is good, wise and fun.