School context variables and students' smoking. Testing a mediation model through multilevel analysis.

Background/aims: This study applied a multilevel approach to examine the associations between school smoking policy and student smoking. It was tested whether individual characteristics are mediators of school policy effects.

Methods: On the basis of cross-sectional data from 3,364 students and school principals from 40 schools in Germany, two multilevel nonlinear regression models were computed for current smoking.