Abstract:
Smoking among health science students should be concerned, as they will take important role to take care of peoples health in the future. The purposes of this study were to describe the smoking and examine the factors associated with smoking among health science students in the autonomous university, eastern region. The 240 representative sample recruited by a systematic random sampling. They were18 years old and older who were studying in the field of health sciences including the faculty of medicine, faculty of nursing, faculty of public health, faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, faculty of allied health sciences, and faculty of Abhaibhubejhr Thai traditional medicine. Instruments used in this study were stress assessment form, attitude towards smoking questionnaire, attitude towards professional role about smoking questionnaire and smoking refusal self-efficacy questionnaire. The reliability was analyzed and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient were .81, .81, .88 and .97 respectively. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Chi-square test and Fishers exact test. Finding of the study showed that the smoking was 10.0%. Among the sample having smoking experience, 25% of them had already tried smoking, 37.5% of them had ever smoked and 37.5% of them have smoked occasionally. The significant factors related to smoking were other drug use ( 2x = 28.44, p < .001), smoking refusal self-efficacy (p < .001), attitude towards smoking( 2x = 4.27, p = .039), peer smoking ( 2x = 21.39, p < .001), peer offers of smoking (p < .001), and family member smoking ( 2x = 10.00, p = .002). Results of the study will be beneficial to be as a smoking prevention guideline development for health science students who are going to be important health personal of Thai public health system in the future