Resilience as a protective factor for secondary school students against tobacco use

Abstract

Background: resilience is a social skill with great involvement in the prevention and reduction of smoking behavior. Objective: to determine the effect of resilience on tobacco consumption in students of the “Paco Cabrera” Secondary School from Puerto Padre, Las Tunas, in May 2023. Methods: a cross-sectional, analytical observational study was carried out on 257 students in secondary education, time and with the objective stated. The information was collected from a questionnaire and the 14 items Resilience Scale. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used in the statistical analysis. Results: smoking students were 14 years old (41.51 %), male (64.15 %) and ninth grade (45.28 %); 11.32 % of smokers had low or very low resilience (X2=30.309; p=0.0000). The overall resilience score for student smokers was 11.22 lower than for nonsmokers (w=2172.0; p=0.0000). The items of both subscales were statistically higher in the group of non-smokers (p<0.05); in the analysis of the correlations between smoking and variables related to resilience, statistically significant association was found between smoking and 9 of the 15 variables analyzed. In all cases, the correlation values were negative, showing the protective capacity that resilience shows to this addiction. Conclusions: the effect of resilience on tobacco use in the studied adolescents sample was determined.

Keywords

• resiliencia
• consumo de tabaco
• adolescencia
• estudiantes de secundaria básica