Family Environment, Social Capital and Smoking among Brazilian Migrants in the Boston Metropolitan Area

Background: Although a higher proportion of Foreign-born Brazilian adults residing in the seven-county Boston-Cambridge-Quincy Metropolitan statistical area (BCQ-MSA) smoke cigarettes compared with other U.S. adult residents, little research has investigated how individual, familial, neighborhood and broader social networks influence the probability of smoking using probabilistic sample data. We hypothesize that foreign-born Brazilian adults who resided in a home with at least one other smoker or having had a lower socioeconomic status (SES) network was positively associated with having been a current smoker, controlling for a host of other individual and extra-individual level factors.

Methods: We link new individual-level data from the 2007 Boston Metropolitan Immigrant Health & Legal Status Survey (BM-IHLSS) with 2000 U.S. Census Summary File 1 (SF1) block-level data to estimate (using logistic regression and controlling for neighborhood clustering) how individual characteristics and behaviors, family environment, neighborhood context, and social capital influenced the probability of having been a current smoker among 307 foreign-born adult Brazilians residing in BCQ-MSA.

Results: Controlling for a host of other factors, we find that foreign-born Brazilian adults having resided in a home with at least one other smoker was positively and strongly associated with having been a current smoker. We did not find evidence that social capital influenced having been a current smoker.

Conclusions: Efforts to reduce smoking among recent migrants to the United States, or at least recent Brazilian migrants residing in the BCQ-MSA, may benefit by focusing on household-level interventions.