Racial convergence in cigarette use from adolescence to the mid-thirties.

Cigarette smoking by whites and African Americans shows puzzling age differences: An African American advantage during the teen years no longer appears in mid-adulthood. This study uses two data sets to examine whether the life-course change is real--and not due to misleading comparisons across different cohorts--and then whether the racial convergence is consistent with resource or stress arguments emphasizing, respectively, cessation among whites or late initiation among African Americans. First, multilevel growth models using data from the National Youth Survey-a prospective, longitudinal study of a randomly selected national sample of teens followed from ages 12 to 18 in 1977 to ages 26 to 34 in 1992--reveal that the racial convergence in smoking prevalence over the life course among this cohort is due primarily to greater white cessation. Second, consecutive cross-sectional samples of the National Health Survey replicate the broad patterns found in the NYS and show that convergence in smoking trajectories by race has strengthened over time. Together the results most favor a resource explanation of the different life-course patterns of smoking among whites and African Americans.