Cigarette Smoking and External Locus of Control Among Young Adolescents

Despite its widely publicized negative health effects, children entering their early teens continue to initiate the cigarette habit. This study suggests that seventh graders with external locus of control perception represent the group at greatest risk to start smoking early, to smoke at high frequency, and to plan continuation of smoking behavior. However, the relation between smoking and locus of control appears to be nonlinear. Instead, early adolescents who never smoked exhibit a decidedly more internal orientation than do persons having any smoking experience, regardless of frequency. These findings suggest that deterrence programs should aim directly at individuals with personality characteristics and attributes associated with externality, so as to reduce the contribution of fatalism or learned helplessness to early smoking onset. Future research should account for differences in locus of control when investigating the effectiveness of different program alternatives in smoking deterrence.