Discussion

There is a common belief in Bangladesh that smoking cigarettes hampers the academic
performance of students. The findings of our study show statistically significant reasons to conclude
that smoking cigarettes does indeed have a negative association with the CGPA of University going
smokers. Our finding is also in par with the findings we came across in the STUDY. However, there
was no statistically significant correlation between CGPA of the participant and their addiction level.
CGPA was also found to be positively correlated with usual studying habits, while it was found to have
no statistically significant association with Sleeping Habit of the participant. These correlations were
measured as to check for confounding effects.

Our findings also shed light on the negative association between smoking and social behavior
of the smokers. We have found statistically significant relationships between smoking and the social
attributes, which were represented through average time spent with friends/colleagues, closeness to
family and number of restaurant visits per week. Since we used Chi-Square tests to find the dependence
between smoking and the social behavior of the participants, we could conclude that there is a
relationship between them but could not conclude as to whether the relationship was positive or
negative.

However, our study was limited in the fact that we could not analyze when smoking affected
performance in a person’s academic journey. We could have addressed this limitation if we would have
taken the grades of the participants throughout their academic journey, for example Grades of O
Levels/SSC, Grades of A Level/HSC, Grades of Undergraduate program, Grades of Masters’ program
and Grades of PhD/DBA, whenever applicable. Then, we could observe the trend of the participant’s
academic performance before and after they took up smoking and come to a conclusion as to when and
how smoking affected their academic performance.

From our findings we can conclude with significant statistical evidence that non-smokers have
a higher mean CGPA than do smokers. This can be concluded from the results of the independent t-test
which concludes that there is a significant relationship between smoking status and the CGPA of the
smokers. Based on this, we conduct a one-tailed z-test to get statistical proof that the mean CGPA of
non-smokers is indeed higher than that of smokers. This finding is in par with the common belief of the
people of this country and the findings of the secondary data we used, which depicts an association of
smoking with poorer performance in academics.

The findings of our study however present a mismatch in the common notion that smokers are
more likely to have an imbalance of dietary intake and hence an unhealthier lifestyle. As evident from
the Chi-Square test of smoking status and the participant’s belief of following a balanced diet, there is
no relationship between the two variables. The independent t-test of smoking status and the body mass
index of the participant further validates our findings as we can conclude with significant statistical
evidence that there is no relation between the two variables. This finding is contradictory to the common
belief and the findings of the other similar studies conducted in the secondary data we have used.

Nevertheless, there is a limitation in our study in that we asked for the participants input as to
whether they think they follow a balanced diet. The problem here lies in the fact that a person’s belief
as to whether they follow a balanced diet or not might not be accurate. Since a balanced diet contains
fixed amounts of nutrients for specific weight classes, it is very difficult to follow a proper balanced
diet and the participant might be assuming that they are following a balanced diet when in reality, they
are not. We could have addressed this limitation if we would have taken inputs as to how much of
certain nutrients a participant consumes each day but this would have made our survey more complex
and answering the questionnaire would have become tedious for the participants resulting a lack of
responses due to being less respondent-friendly.

The secondary data we used reported findings of strong association between peer smoking and
participant’s smoking. Our study can conclude the same findings as percentages show peer pressure to
be a common reason for taking up smoking and continuing it. Compared to the paper by Villanti, Boulay
and Juan, where smoking due to peer pressure in the United States among adolescents was
approximately 20.64%, whereas our study revealed that 75.7% of the smokers in our sample had taken
up smoking due to influence from friends and colleagues and 27.1% smokers continue smoking due to
peer pressure. These data indicate that peer pressure among the University-going students in
Bangladesh play a more profound role in a participant taking up and continuing smoking.

Our study does have its fair share of limitations however. The study is limited to sampling of
university students from major government and private universities in Dhaka and Chittagong and does
not include students from other universities all over the country. Thus, findings from the present study
may not generalize to all university students or be representative of the population we wished to
examine. Also, in an effort to reduce response burden, only a limited number of variables were
examined. Ideally, it would be useful to gather data that elucidate potential relationships with a broader
host of biological, economic, and environmental variables.

Moreover, since the study is based on self-reported information on cigarette smoking, weight,
height, CGPA and other personal and social attributes, there is the chance of discrepancies in the data
as it is prone to desirability effect and might be tainted with inaccurate information. Our questionnaire
also asks the respondent whether or not they smoke, making it impossible to differentiate between
regular and occasional smokers. We did not include occasional smokers in our sample to get a better
comparison between smokers and non-smokers and as a result our sample is not representative of the
population.