Social Perception of Smoking Practices among Students

Smoking has been studied in the social sciences field for a long time. It can’t be said that smoking is considered good or evil equally for the whole society. Besides, such new and popular among young people practice as vaping appeared in the beginning of 21th century, and apparently, it seems alike to the traditional cigarette use. Present study considers smoking and vaping as social practices and uses a stereotype concept in attempt to reveal perceptions and attitudes of modern students towards these practices. Such methods as interviewing and content analysis is used for this purpose. Results show that stereotypes for the smoking practices appear only in several groups related to smoking; besides that, vaping could not be viewed as an analog for traditional smoking due to the fact it appears to be a whole new culture.