National survey of tobacco use among college students in Taiwan

A nationwide survey was conducted to assess the smoking behavior among college students in Taiwan. Stratified cluster sampling was used to select 12 colleges based on location and educational system (general vs. vocational). Probability proportional to size method was used to sample 5 departments in each college; all students in the first and third grade were targeted. An overall completion rate of 88.2% was achieved, and 5,403 self-administered questionnaires were completed. The weighted prevalence of ever-tried smoking, smoking within 30-day, current smoking (30-day plus >100 cigarettes in lifetime), and 30-day use of other tobacco products were 43.5%, 16.4%, 12.7%, and 3.9% in males and 20.9%, 3.7%, 1.9%, and 0.7% in females. The 30-day smoking rates among individual colleges ranged from 3.8% to 28.7% in males and 1.9% to 11.1% in females; the rates were generally inversely related to academic admission requirements of individual college. Among the 30-day smokers,49.9% of female and 23.8% of male students smoked in less than 10 days; 77.9% of female and 52.9% of male students smoked ≤5 cigarettes per day. In multivariate analysis, current smoking was positively associated with male, third grade, vocational colleges, parent smoking, underestimating health risk of smoking, overestimating adult smoking rate, and peer smoking.