Date of Award

January 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Abigail Friedman

Second Advisor

Jamie Tam

Abstract

Background: Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable mortality. Understanding the consumption patterns of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, two of the most prevalent and harmful tobacco products, is important for population health. Furthermore, as the nation's largest racial or ethnic minority group, the Hispanic population faces tobacco-related disparities despite overall low prevalence of tobacco use. Since the Hispanic population is not homogeneous, it is important to disaggregate it by ancestry and nativity status to better guide policy and targeted interventions.

Methods: The 2022 September Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) included 37,540 participants in the US. Rao-Scott chi-squared tests and multivariate logistic regressions were used to analyze the associations between cigarette and e-cigarette use and nativity status for individuals of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Central American, South American, and Other Spanish ancestry. In addition, multivariate logistic regressions assessed cigarette and e-cigarette use across race, ethnicity, and Hispanic ancestral origin within the US-born population.

Results: After accounting for sociodemographic differences, only individuals of Mexican ancestry demonstrated differences in tobacco use by nativity status. US-born individuals had higher prevalences of current smoking and vaping, as well as daily vaping, and were more likely to allow cigarette or e-cigarette use at home than their foreign-born peers (p < 0.05 in all cases). However, US-born individuals of Mexican ancestry were still at lower risk compared to US-born NH-Whites.

Conclusions: The failure to observe differences in tobacco use by nativity status, or differences with US-born NH-Whites among other Hispanic subgroups, may be attributed to their high risk or the small sample sizes limiting the statistical power needed to detect true differences. Future efforts should focus on better collection of Hispanic-specific data.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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