This study will comprise three groups: pregnant women with asthma, children requiring intensive care unit (ICU) admission for asthma, and asthmatics requiring emergency care. In one part of the study, researchers will randomly assign pregnant women with asthma of African American or Hispanic race/ethnicity to one of two culturally sensitive asthma education and smoking cessation programs. At the same time, investigators will examine asthma-related morbidity in a large cohort of pregnant asthmatic women utilizing administrative data and vital records. Perceptions of asthma severity and ways to describe it appear to differ in African Americans compared to whites. Therfore, asthmatic patients attending the emergency room, along with their families, will be invited to participate in a focus group to validate a culturally sensitive instrument to allow improved descriptors of asthma severity for African Americans. Estimates by the patients of asthma severity will be matched to objective measure, and compared with those of whites. This methodology will then be used to extend the hypothesis to children admitted with severe asthma to the region's only pediatric ICU. In the pediatric ICU, the admission rates and outcomes will be associated with the potentially important genetic variations in the beta 2 adrenergic receptor (BADR2). Using parents and non-affected siblings as case controls, a novel computational method will test for gene-gene interactions that explain a genetic basis for asthma disparities in severe asthma.