Smoking prevalence, associated attitudes and comparison of negative automatic thoughts among high school students in Turkey

Introduction: Research indicates that social stressors, negative affect, anxiety or depression are associated with increased prevalence for smoking in adolescents. Aims and objectives: The aim of this study is to determine the smoking prevalence and to find out whether spending more time on the internet or psychological characteristics like negative thoughts, idea of failure at school affect smoking among adolescents. Methods: Self-administered anonymous sociodemographic questionnaire and automatic thoughts questionnaire (ATQ) were conducted using a sample of students in grades 9 through 12 at eight different public senior high schools in Karabuk, Turkey. A descriptive analysis was made, and The Chi-square and The Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the groups. Results: From 463 participating students, aged 14-19 years (43.9% female, 56.1% male), 40 (8,7%) had tried it or former smokers and 48 (10,4%) were occasionally or daily smokers. Students with male gender (p Conclusions: In order to understand better, perhaps future researches about smoking in adolescen can target more psychological basis of smoking behavior.