Cigarette smoking
Ethnic differences
There is considerable variation by ethnicity in the prevalence of smoking in the youth population.
Rate ratios provide a useful comparison between the prevalence of current smoking within a single ethnic group and the prevalence across the total population. They show that in 2006/07, Māori young people and in particular Māori young women were much more likely to be current smokers than the population as a whole, and Pacific young men (though not young women) slightly more so.
Young Māori women are more likely than any other ethnic sex sub-group to be current smokers: the New Zealand Health Survey 2006/07 found that Māori women aged 15 to 24 were twice as likely to be current smokers as young women aged 15 to 24 overall.
Asian young men and women were less likely than the total population to be current smokers.
Prevalence (age-standardised rate ratio) of current cigarette smoking among young people aged 15 to 24 years, by sex and ethnicity, 2006/07
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand Health Survey 2006/07, total-response ethnicity data. The horizontal gridline at 1.00 represents the total population against which comparative rate ratios are calculated. Where lines extending from datapoints do not cross the 1.00 gridline, this indicates a significant difference between the prevalence of current smoking within the ethnic population compared to the total population.
Note
We encourage you to be cautious about drawing conclusions from comparisons between ethnic groups. Apparent differences (in unadjusted data) between ethnic groups can often be explained by factors other than ethnicity per se, such as the different age, sex, geographical and socioeconomic distributions of different ethnic populations. In addition, datasets vary in the way that they collect and record ethnicity data.
