The chromatic index $χ'(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest $k$ for which $G$ admits an edge $k$-coloring such that any two adjacent edges have distinct colors. The strong chromatic index $χ'_s(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest $k$ such that $G$ has an edge $k$-coloring with the condition that any two edges at distance at most 2 receive distinct colors. A graph is 1-planar if it can be drawn in the plane so that each edge is crossed by at most one other edge. In this paper, we show that every graph $G$ with maximum average degree $\bar{d}(G)$ has $χ'_{s}(G)\le (2\bar{d}(G)-1)χ'(G)$. As a corollary, we prove that every 1-planar graph $G$ with maximum degree $Δ$ has $χ'_{\rm s}(G)\le 14Δ$, which improves a result, due to Bensmail et al., which says that $χ'_{\rm s}(G)\le 24Δ$ if $Δ\ge 56$.