Reducing Children’s Exposure to Passive Smoking in Rural Communities of Bangladesh: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

Passive smoking prevalence is high in Bangladesh. We aimed to explore the association of the theory of planned behavior constructs to reduce the exposure of passive smoking among children in the rural area of Bangladesh. Study Design: Cross-sectional study.

Overall, 410 adults had been taken at random following a self-administrative questionnaire. Data had been collected from six villages of Munshiganj district of Bangladesh from Jul to Oct 2018. Descriptive statistics were applied to describe socio-demographic characteristics. Inter correlations coefficient was done to observe the correlation, differences between demographic and dependent variables were assessed for significance using the Chi-square or Fisher’s exact test as appropriate. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were used to investigate the association between the theory of planned behavior constructs and exposure of passive smoking among both smoker and nonsmoker groups. All results were presented as unadjusted and adjusted odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). A P-value ≤0.05 was considered as statistically significant.

Attitude (OR 0.681, 95% CI: 0.498, 0.931) among smoker and intention (OR 0.226, 95% CI: 0.081, 0.633) was found statistically significant constructs (P<0.001) among non-smoker to reduce the exposure. Additionally, the prevalence of passive smoking exposure was found 36.6% (95% CI: 0.32%, 0.41%) on average 40% among males and 28.33% among females.

The theory of planned behavior constructs is useful to reduce the exposure of passive smoking among children, which may be useful in the future to design interventions of controlling passives smoking exposure.