Despite country’s tobacco control law, cigarette smoking by the young people and the magnitude of nicotine dependence among the school personnel is alarming. To determine the prevalence of smoking and to examine the determinants of smoking behaviour among the secondary school teachers in Bangladesh. A two-stage cluster sampling was used with a selection of schools on Probability Proportional to Enrolment (PPE) size followed by stratified random sampling of government and private schools and then all the teachers present on the day of the survey were selected for the study. The 66-item questionnaire included smoking behaviour, knowledge, attitude, second-hand smoking, tobacco free school policy, cessation, media advertisement and curriculum related topics. Seven additional questions were included to assess the socio-demographic characteristics of the teachers. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 17 software. A total of 60 schools were selected with school response rate of 98.3%. An anonymous self-administered questionnaire was filled in by all teachers present at the day of the survey. The sample consisted of 559 teachers with response rate of 99.5%. The prevalence of smoking was 17% (95% CI: 14%, 20.4). About half of the teachers (48.4%) smoke daily followed by 25.3% smoke 1-2 days in last 30 days. The mean duration smoking of was 13.7(95% CI: 11.6, 15.9) years. Logistic regression analysis revealed that male teachers smoke 37.46(95% CI: 5.078, 276.432) times higher than their female counterparts. The graduate teachers were 2.179(95% 1.209, 3.926) times more likely to be smoke than master’s degree holder teachers. Smoking by friends appeared to be the strongest predictor for teachers smoking behaviour (OR 4.789, 95% CI: 1.757, 13.050). However, no statistically significant association was found between type of school, second-hand smoking and curriculum related factors and smoking behaviour of the teachers (p>0.05). Prevalence of smoking among the teachers is high in Bangladesh. Effective smoking prevention program should take into account within the dominant of socio-environmental influence to reduce smoking behaviour. The school curriculum items had less impact in preventing smoking behaviour.
Smoking ; Behavior ; Faculty ; Bangladesh ; Prevalence