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Peer Effects and Smoking Susceptibilitly among Secondary School Students in Cameroon
Rosy Pascale Meyet Tchouapi, Fuein Vera Kim & Aloysius Mom Njong
IJED, Vol. 17 No. 1,
1-27 (2024)
This study seeks to determine the effect of peer influences on susceptibility to smoke among secondary school students in Cameroon based on the 2014 Cameroonian Global Youth Tobacco Survey. The survey collected information on the smoking behaviour of 2922 students in forms 1 to 4 nested in 25 randomly selected secondary schools. Considering the multi-stage survey sampling design, we control for endogeneity in school selection and unobserved school-level characteristics through the use of school fixed-effects. We appeal to the use of instrumental variable estimators to control for simultaneity in peer effect and susceptibility to smoke in student behaviours. Estimation results are subjected to a robustness check by jointly estimating the structural smoking susceptibility function and the reduced form equation of the potential endogenous variable with the help of conditional mixed process estimation. We find consistent evidence that student smoking susceptibility is responsive to peer influences across all the estimation methods. We establish that a 1% point increase in peer smoking increases the probability of student smoking susceptibility by 5.70% points on average. This finding implies that any policy intervention to reduce student smoking susceptibility must consider the social multiplier effect of peer pressures on currently non-smoking students.
