Abstract
This study evaluates descriptive (DN) and injunctive social norms (IN) as direct predictors of smoking attitudes and the mediating roles of attitudes toward tobacco use and perceived behavioral consequences between them among Chinese college students. An Internet survey was conducted on 711 students from 37 colleges in Beijing. Respondents reported DN, including the perceived prevalence of smoking (PP) and beliefs about smoking prevalence (BP), and IN, including perceived approval of close people (PA-C) and perceived approval based on gender (PA-G). Personal attitudes toward smoking (ATT), perceived consequences of smoking (PC), and current smoking behaviors were also explored. For ATT, all other social norms significantly predicted college students’ attitudes on smoking except PP-male and gender norms (i.e., PP-female and PA-G) linked to females’ ATT. PP-male and PA-C showed effects on current smoking status. PP-female plays a unique role in female smoking behaviors. PA-C, PA-G, BP, and PP-male indirectly influenced smoking behavior through individual attitudes toward cigarette smoking only among males but not females. IN was stronger in shaping Chinese college students’ attitudes and behaviors on smoking than DN. Gender norms played a unique role in Chinese college students’ smoking attitudes and behaviors. These findings highlighted that the Chinese college students’ smoking attitudes and tobacco use may be embedded within a collectivist cultural lens. The Chinese government’s future tobacco control efforts should consider combining DN and IN for interventions and refining policies targeting different genders.
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Data availability
Data and material are available upon reasonable request.
Code availability
We mainly used Mplus 7.4 and SPSS 20.0 for data analysis, and the code is available upon reasonable request.
Notes
BBS is a popular social networking platform among young people in China. Platform users can see the recruitment advertisements posted on the platform. QQ and WeChat are products of Tencent company from China. They have been a popular social media in Mainland China for more than 10 years. QQ and WeChat groups are chat rooms where hundreds can join. In our study, the platform users in the groups are mainly college students in Beijing.
The female to male ratio was 6:4 in the sample pool.
Current smokers were defined as people who smoked at least once in past 30 days.
We set every 10 percent as a cutoff point to divide the answers into 10 points. For example, 0% − 10% were converted to 1, and 11%–20% were converted to 2.
We also conducted a linear regression analysis for DN (measured by PP-female, PP-male, and BP) and IN (measured by PA-C and PA-G) predicting ATT and PC in the total sample and between genders after controlling for sociodemographic factors (see Supplementary file) .
The higher scores of PA-C indicates greater perceptions of disapproval toward smoking, whereas the higher scores of other norms indicate more approval or stronger belief that smoking is prevalent among others.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Min Gong from RAND Corporation for her supervision in designing this research, providing resource for data collection and analysis, and help in funding acquisition; Xiao-Fei Xie from Beijing University for her help in manuscript writing; Yang-Yang Zhang from Shaanxi Normal University and Jiaying Xiao from Beijing Normal University for recruiting participants and collected data.
Funding
This research was supported by Beijing Natural Science Foundation (BNSF, 9172019), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 71801110), Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (18YJC630268, 19YJC190029), Natural Science Fund of Guangdong Province (2021A1515011249), Research Fund for Junior Faculty in Human and Social Science, Shenzhen University (QNFC1903), CAS Engineering Laboratory for Psychological Service (KFJ-PTXM-29).
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Lei Zhou: Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Visualization, Writing-original draft and Writing-review and editing.
Yan Zhang: Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Writing-original draft and Writing-review and editing.
William G. Shadel: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Resources, Validation and Writing-review and editing.
Zhu-Yuan Liang: Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing-original draft and Writing-review and editing.
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Zhou, L., Zhang, Y., Shadel, W.G. et al. Impact of social norms on Chinese college students’ tobacco use. Curr Psychol 42, 17661–17669 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02777-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02777-w