Abstract
This study focuses on addressing the issue of nicotine dependence in students at the university level. This study examines the trends in both male and female students from the age of 18 years and above. Another objective of this study is to examine and find out the major causes of perceived stress with regard to gender differences in the university. Additionally, it also explores on the smoking activities that the students engage into with the aim of reducing stress levels and cope with individuals’ pressures. This paper also highlights on the methodologies, results, limitations, and eventually provides conclusion and recommendations.
Problem Statement and Hypothesis: There numerous reasons that make students smoke, and one of them is because they want to cope with stress of coping up with the challenges within the university. This is because most of the students believe that smoking is a way of reducing stress. This research aims at exploring numerous factors the students believe are capable of reducing stress and help in coping up with the numerous challenges students face at the university.
1. Perceived Stress and Nicotine Dependence in University Students
a) Introduction
Nicotine, a chemical derivative from the tobacco plant worms its way into the nervous system and alters the neurological functions and with time, leads to death and or malfunction of vital organs. This study aims to point out the effects of nicotine by conducting a study that compares both male and female university students.
b) The Role of Nicotine once Consumed
Nicotine, like all other drugs and harmful substances, has the ability to alter itself and act as part of the body while killing the body. As soon as nicotine penetrates the brain, it gets to work mimicking the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for perception, memory, cognition and the other associated primary functions of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex (Libedinsky & Livingstone, 2011). Since the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex is also responsible for the neuropsychological path followed from the retina, the imaging is disturbed. The effect may not be seen initially, but gradually the focus of the eye will lose its shape and the responses are later than those of non-smokers are.
Once in the blood and brain, nicotine provides a state of heightened neural activity due to more excitatory neurotransmitters that will be present within the synaptic clefts of neurons. As a result, an extra molecular space is created that has the capacity to increase homeostatic dopamine-like concentrations within the brain. Possible alterations of cognitive and perceptive deficits that are associated with neurological diseases then have the chance to surface. This is why most smokers have extremely hyper or low behaviour. The level of dopamine is always being tempered with. As time goes on, most of these University students begin to think that they cannot function without smoking because the extra molecular vacant space needs to be filled up with more nicotine.
c) Analysis of previous related studies
Disorders of schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD and lung cancer have all in the past been linked to nicotine. Data collected over the years show that nicotine abuse is dangerous and is related to many disorders(Pomerleau, 1995 )(Watkins, Koob, & Markou, 2000)(Kooy & Laviolette, 2004)(Grucza, et al., August 2013) Looking at these research works motivated the research work to go on and find the negatives of nicotine. The good trend observed from these studies over the years is the fact that nicotine itself can be used to beat its effects.
2. Methods
a) Study design and participants
The study’s data were taken from the Cologne Smoking Study (CoSmoS) that is a case study examining the psychological issues that contribute to smokers getting addicted to nicotine that later leads to smokers suffering from cardiac infraction. The Ethics Committee of the University approved this study. The Smoking Study comprised of 524 participants (N=524), of which 87.2% = 457 were smokers/ex-smokers and 12.8% = 64 were non-smokers. This study design demanded that smokers must be included in the study. Control patients of roughly 174 participants who had been diagnosed with cardiac infraction, cancer and nicotine related illnesses. All these participants were surveyed in hospital with people being interviewed.
b) Measures
A psychologically evaluated instrument (FTND) was used to determine the level of cigarette consumption and incapability to abstain from nicotine with the aim of assessing the nicotine dependence. The German version of the ERI scale consisting of three sub-scales namely; reward, effort, and over-commitment used in measuring the independent variables. Using the participants, effort-reward imbalance was measured using standardized syntax.
The “effort” scale composed of six items measuring extrinsic components of worrying experiences at school and work for those who were working. Some students “Agreed” while others “Disagreed” and those who agreed stated that they fairly felt distressed or distressed or very distressed.
c) Statistical analysis
All the individuals were subjected to the items of the FTND, which were combined into a sum score to help carry a multivariate analysis. For example, scores of roughly one to three represented smokers with low nicotine dependence. Conversely, scores of four to five stood for smokers with a heavy dependence on nicotine. The FTND sum score was dichotomized at the value of four with the aim of comparing students with low nicotine dependence to those with heavy dependence. This was extremely essential for logistic regression since the dependent variable was distributed unfairly.
In carrying the ERI analysis, if the participants never agreed with the statement, their values were assigned a value of zero and, if the participants agreed to have experience of stress, their value stood at one. 4 was the greatest level of stress experience by the participants. This was done using a five-point Likert balance to help in the interpreting the values with regard to varying levels of stress. All the socio-demographic variables was calculated using logistic regression model, while the statistical data analyzed using SPSS version 15.0 for Windows.
3. Results
a) Descriptive statistics
The sample of the study consisted of N = 197 presently smoking and learning participants. Roughly, 70 participants suffered lung cancer, 53 were myocardial infarction patients and roughly, 74 participants were control patients. For the study to assist in prevention of any memory-based distortions, 64 non-smokers and 263 graduants, were excluded from the study. Eventually, the result of all the subsamples was 524 participants since the study was evenly distributed. This distribution of the sociodemographic characteristics is clearly documented in the table hereunder.
Sociodemographic characteristics of the sample (N = 197)
Table 1
Group Mean PSS score SD
Smokers (n= ) 2.65 .633
Ex-Smokers (n= ) 1.2 .366
Non-Smokers (n= ) 1.5 .269
The below scales or degrees of nicotine dependence were evident in the study sample. A total 72 participants, which is equivalent to (25.9%) had a very low dependence on nicotine, 54 participants, which is (27.4%) had a low dependence, 26 participants (13.2%) were moderately dependent, 45 (22.8%) were highly dependent and 21 (10.7%) were very highly dependent. Mean value of the PSS score was 2.65 with a range of (1-5) that clearly indicated a moderate level of dependence.
b) Multivariate analysis
The table below shows the results of the logistic regression are shown in table below.
Results of the logistic regression model, nicotine dependence and ERI (N = 197)
Table 2
Group Mean SD
Smokers (n= ) 163 .364
Ex-smokers (n= ) 131 .193
ERI(no effort-reward imbalance/effort-reward imbalance) 3.573 .435
Cox and Snell pseudo-R2 = .109
Nagelkerke pseudo-R2 = .151
Mc Fadden pseudo-R2 = .10
SD = standard deviation.
In line with the study above, the number of smoking participants decreased by roughly (p = .059). Their possibility of suffering from nicotine dependence was found to be associated with the student’s experience with regard to effort-reward imbalance. This can be translated as (adjusted OR = 0.439; CI = 0.187-1.031). Higher level of education significantly affects the efforts of preventing nicotine dependence.
4. Conclusions
Divergent to the hypothesis of this study, the analysis indicates that numerous occupational factors greatly reduce nicotine dependence in presently smoking students. This is clear as the participants sampling indicates that smoking is related to whatever one does in his or her daily life. Both the hypotheses have been discussed to a greater length contrary to findings of the study. For instance, most people who are working make smoking a habit and they not necessarily smoke because of stress, unlike students. Students also experience an effort-reward imbalance at their learning places, which is subject to an increased risk of regular tobacco consumption.
Provided the small significance of the relation that is found between nicotine dependence and occupational stress as per the above study, caution is necessary when drawing conclusions. According to the above analysis, it is clear that students have higher nicotine dependence. One possible explanation is that students smoke mostly when they are free as compared to employed individuals who can only smoke on very limited times. Additionally, most students begin abusing such substances like smoking bang because of peer pressure from other students who are smokers. Nonetheless, it is impossible to determine nicotine dependence during learning hours. This does not overlook the possibility of having students who work and learn, but also smoke.
According to this study, logistic regressions indicate that non-religious, single and having lower level of education remain significant risk factors for nicotine dependence. Higher level of education participants indicated that since they are aware of the risks associated with smoking, they tend to discourage smoking and this is a protective factor against nicotine dependence. A possible explanation to such a finding with regard to married couples is that they tend to take care of each other thus reducing the levels of smoking.
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