Who Knows About Popular?

-"Popular kids more likely to smoke, research says"
-Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times
-September 6, 2012
-http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-popular-smoking-20120906,0,4687714.story

Research shows that teenagers who are popular in high school are more likely to start smoking. A professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, Thomas Valente, surveyed almost 2,000 students from Latino high schools asking if they had ever smoked, if they had smoked in the last month, how their friends felt about smoking, if people around them smoke, and who they were close with. A few of these questions were used to determine whether that student was popular or not. The percentage of ninth graders who said they had smoked was almost twenty-six percent, but tenth graders were twenty-eight percent. This research showed that the students' peers were the ones who influenced their behavior. Thomas Valente said that in a few high schools, "smoking and popularity go hand-in-hand" and shows that one has matured. However in other high schools, students that are popular do not smoke at all. As previously stated, these students were only one ethnicity, and from an urban area, therefore the results could be different in other areas.