The Effects of Education on Smoking
The act of smoking tobacco has been a part of human culture for centuries. In the 1900’s, a new form of smoking was introduced to the general public called cigarettes. It was an easy way for people to smoke as they came in packs and could be sparked up anywhere, especially in a time when there was minimal medical research done on them. The cigarette gained instant popularity and was a huge part of American culture for much of the 20th century. There are many reasons why the cigarette became such a popular product, whether it was for social reasons or just pure addiction. As doctors began to recognize the harmful effects that they cause, the popularity of cigarettes has rapidly declined in America, although the opposite could be said for Europe and the rest of the world. As we became more educated about the effects of cigarettes, less and less people smoked or became addicted to them. It is interesting to see how our behaviors change when we are informed.
With that background out of the way, it is important to understand why cigarettes and smoking are being discussed in this post. This article is going to be using a US counties dataset in order to explore different relationships between variables and make sense of them. Specifically, this post is going to explore and make sense of unusually related variables. The dataset has variables for many different demographics of people and their behaviors. This post specifically is going to look at the unusual relationship between levels of education and adult smoking rates. There are two variables in this dataset that indicate levels of education. They are “percentage graduated high school” and “percentage graduated college”.
When looking at the data in python, the correlations between different variables can be found and then understood as either a random association or a causal relationship. First, it was found that the correlation between high school graduation and adult smoking is 0.71 or 70% of adult smokers are high school graduates. This was interesting because it is hard to assume that this level of education is a direct cause for smoking in adult life. There are so many questions that follow this observation like how much funding did each high school receive? Or how well did students perform in health classes? There are many other factors that could indicate whether someone is to become a smoker or not. The graph above shows a strong correlation between the two, but it is probable that this is just a random correlation. However, it could be argued that a high school education is not enough for people to learn that smoking is harmful and that they should refrain from doing it. It is possible that many high schools do not educate students on the harmfulness of smoking cigarettes and tobacco. Many individuals who only graduate from high school go on to jobs that are lower-level in their field as they do not possess college degrees. These jobs may have an environment where smoking is commonplace which could lead people to start smoking to fit the social norms or relieve stress from their hard jobs. In order to understand this better, it would help to look at a similar variable.
A similar variable to high school graduates is college graduates. These variables are closely related, so it was surprising that the exact opposite correlation was found. When looking at the relationship between college graduates and adult smoking rates, the correlation found between the two was -0.71. It was extremely surprising to find that an extra four years of schooling did the exact opposite for the correlation between them. It is much easier to understand how this relationship would be causal compared to high school graduates. College students go above and beyond to educate themselves on just about everything. These students are more likely to take care of themselves mentally and physically because they set themselves to a high standard as students of universities. As students in college, they had to work hard and learn a lot to get into their colleges, as well as graduate from them. An individual who is highly educated would be more likely to know the harmful effects of smoking and stay away from it.
It is interesting to see how some variables that do not seem related at all can cause such strong correlations, especially when it comes to these variables that are complete opposites. It is evident that there is a strong negative causal relationship between smoking and college graduates.
