Family Communication Patterns and Stress-Coping Strategies as Predictors of Smoking: A Case Study of 13 -18 year-old Male Smokers and Non-Smokers of Mashhad

The purpose of this research is to study the family communication patterns (conversation-oriented and conformity-oriented) and stress-coping strategies (emotional-focused and problem-focused) as the predictors of dependence of 13–18 year-old male smokers and non-smokers to cigarette in Mashhad. A statistical sample of 182 male teenagers (91 smokers and 91 non-smokers) residing in Mashhad were randomly selected through the process of multistage cluster sampling from two regions (regions 2 and 5) among seven regions of Mashhad and from 14 districts in these two regions. A revised version of Koerner-Fitzpatrick Scale (1990) and Karami-Zinalkhani Scale were used to evaluate the aspects of family communication patterns and stress-coping skills (2010), respectively. In addition to descriptive statistics methods, discriminant analysis method was used for data analysis. The results confirmed all the hypotheses of the research and showed that the teenager's tendency to smoking could be predicted by studying the conversation-oriented communication pattern, conformity-oriented communication pattern, problem-focused stress-coping skills and emotional-focused stress coping skills.