Introduction: Understanding adolescent smoking trajectories is necessary for tailored prevention programs.
Aim: To identify adolescent cigarette use patterns and risk factors of smoking trajectories by a longitudinal study.
Method: We conducted a three-year prospective survey in two age cohorts (6th and 9th school grades) of metropolitan adolescents (n = 1,092) with yearly data collection by self-administered questionnaires. Five smoking trajectory groups were defined by cigarette smoking data.
Results: 67.5% of the sample remained nonsmoker, 11.3% smoked all the time, 14.3% were initiators, 3.3% quitters and 3.7% experimenters. Members of smoking trajectory groups differed significantly from each other according to number of smoking friends, parental smoking, family structure, academic achievement and weekly allowance at baseline.
Conclusions: Concerning tobacco prevention programs, adolescents are not homogenous population, because distinct set of risk factors are highlighted in their different smoking behavior groups. Orv. Hetil., 2017, 158(2), 67-76.
Keywords: adolescence; dohányzás; longitudinal survey; longitudinális kutatás; prevenció; prevention; serdülőkor; smoking.