, 2004; Griesler & Kandel, 1998; Headen et al., 1991; Mermelstein, 1999), and our findings add credence to the recommendation to develop interventions that incorporate strong parenting http://www.selleckchem.com/products/Calcitriol-(Rocaltrol).html practices in the prevention of all youth smoking. Our data indicate that high levels of family factors such as connectedness, monitoring, and parental punishment were protective against smoking across all racial/ethnic groups. While all these factors have been shown to protect against smoking in prior studies (Griesler & Kandel, 1998; Kandel et al., 2004; Sargent & Dalton, 2001; Simons-Morton et al., 2004), our findings add to the literature by supporting that these influences are protective against smoking in non-White youth as well.

Furthermore, we found that greater protection was usually afforded against recent smoking than against ever smoking with higher levels of family influences. This supports the research that suggests that such influences are protective against smoking transitions from experimentation to progression during adolescence (Simons-Morton et al., 2004); however, our findings need to be confirmed in a longitudinal sample. We also found protection against smoking in two racial/ethnic groups by factors that have not been examined in previous work. These were parental attitudes toward monitoring and intention to monitor. However, we also found significant correlations between these newer family influences and others, including parental intention to monitor and parental attitudes toward monitoring, punishment, and monitoring.

It is possible that these differences in attitude were seen in the same set of parents who also exhibit higher levels of protective influences against smoking in general. Thus, it is possible that these newer measures may be better analyzed as a composite measure. Nevertheless, it is important to note that these protective family factors are significant over and above the strong prosmoking influences of parental and peer smoking. This finding and its possible protection against smoking behavior also need to be verified in a longitudinal sample to determine how these attitudes may be translated into protective parenting practices for future intervention development. The current study is subject to limitations. First, smaller subsample sizes among Black and Hispanic youth may account for the greater number of significant risk and protective factors found for White youth compared with minority youth (Westat, 2006).

Second, although the NSPY permits the examination of a broad range of family factors that were potentially protective against smoking, important factors were not Dacomitinib measured. For example, there are no measures of parental supportiveness, parental acceptance, or behavioral control, all of which are protective parenting practices (Chassin, Presson, Rose, & Sherman, 2001; Stanton et al., 2000).