Sociology of Smoking

According to Bob Doughty of VOA News, smoking is the leading cause of preventable death and cancer in the world, but nearly a billion people still smoke. These people are not simply stupid or careless. Their actions are determined by sociological factors, which also affect what people buy at the grocery store or what kind of clothes they wear. Understanding the factors leading people to smoke is to understand basic principles of sociology or social psychology, which is the study of explaining society's actions as a whole.

Cultural Appeal

• An article in the journal "Tobacco Control" discusses how smoking advertisements appeal to children and make them want to smoke, associating things like sexiness, maturity, glamor, manliness, rebelliousness and coolness with smoking. Stop Smoking Now, an anti-tobacco website, states anti-smoking activists are trying to relate tobacco to things like death, cancer, emphysema and other harmful effects.

Economy

• A 2007 study by Gallup shows that there is no clear relationship between smoking rates and the country smokers live in. In both studies, most of the countries with the lowest smoking rates also had very low average income, clearly showing that the cost of smoking does sometimes deter populations from smoking. Still, many of the countries like Cuba and Bangladesh with the highest smoking rates had low average incomes. No major industrialized nations such as the United States, England, Germany or Japan were in the top 20 countries with the highest smoking rates. While a place's economy does have some impact on the smoking rate, there are still other factors to be considered, like the relative cost of cigarettes and the social acceptance of smoking in a given country.

Laws

• Laws in a country or region dictate how the majority of people will behave. In many developed or industrialized countries, there are smoking bans or limitations that keep the number of smokers low. In the United States, the European Union, Canada and other major industrial nations, there are laws governing health warnings, sales to minors and smoking in public places. China is the world's most populated country and it consumes one third of the world's tobacco. There are absolutely no laws regulating tobacco sales to minors and virtually no restrictions on smoking. There are no laws requiring health warning and, according to BBC News, most Chinese smokers don't believe cigarettes cause cancer or heart disease.

Education

• A person's education often determines whether or not he smokes. The more education a person has, the less likely he is to smoke. The Ultimate Quitting Guide, citing a 2005 Center for Disease Control study, states that 40 percent of people in the United States with a GED or high school diploma smoke, as opposed to 7.5 percent of people with graduate degrees. The reason for this could be that people with less education are not as aware of the harmful effects of smoking, but there is no clear relationship.

Social Acceptance

• Dr. C. S. Houston, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, argues that smoking will continue to be prevalent until it becomes morally and socially unacceptable. Writing in 1986, he said that society had been moving toward this since 1975. Today, more and more countries are ostracizing smokers and limiting where they can smoke. By making smoking in certain places illegal, the act of smoking becomes symbolic of wrongdoing which, according to Dr. Houston, is the key to cutting back on smoking rates.