Parents’ Role in Their Children Smoking Habit

This term we were supposed to do a survey report about smoking. My team Aliya, Atigah, Sooma, and I wanted to know how people in Southern Illinois University feel about the parents’ role in their children’s’ smoking habit. We formulated our hypothesis, “Students who have parents who smoke are more likely to start smoking”. We conducted 47 surveys in SIU (33 males, 14 females). All of the surveys were done at SIU students’ center and engineering college. Personally I got 15 out of the surveys. Actually I gain a lot from doing the surveys. For example, I got to know how American students cooperate with internationals. And also it gave me more self-confidence to meet new people and make good relations.

In general, the project was successful because of a number of reasons. First, it gave me an opportunity to know how American students deal with internationals. Second, this survey gave me the key skills to do professional research papers that will help me in my future academic study. Third, doing studies like this would give me more confidence to do future studies to understand how people think about certain issues. Actually the results were in accordance with our hypothesis because in my RRJ 4 I wrote about it and I made a small study to check the reality of the article that I was reading and the results were in accordance with the article as well.

Actually the results showed strong evidence that supports our hypothesis. Out of all smokers in our surveys there were 68% of them who had parents who smoke, on the other hand, out of all non-smokers we found that 67% of them had parents who do not smoke. So, the majority of smokers have smoking parents, and non-smokers they have non-smoking parents. The surprising result was, most of smokers think that they can quit smoking whenever they wanted. But we found only 18% managed to quit and 82% were still trying to quit.

Finally I would be better if we could study what were the root causes of smoking and normally at what age the children start smoking. The result of this survey would help s prevent our children from smoking because we would know the main causes, and the age that we should pay more attention to them. We can improve our survey by interviewing more people, not only in SIU but also in lager community as well to get more realistic results that can apply to a larger people groups.