Smoking Motivations and Cessation Rates: An Analysis of Gender‐Based Differences

Abstract

The pharmacological addition syndrome which integrates the complex factors involved in maintenance of smoking as a behaviour, has led to many attempts to find aneffective cessation treatment, either through replacement therapy or through behavioural programmes or a combination of both. Research carried out by the Wessex branch of Operation Smokestop, a project providing training, support and research for community‐based self‐help stop‐smoking groups, reveals that the problem may now be more fruitfully examined through a social and political framework. Such influences may prove to have more bearing on the suggested gender‐based differences in smoking and cessation than that of nicotine alone. Women smoke as a way of dealing with their daily lives. Health and addiction worries result in their greater numbers of attempts to stop smoking. Significant drops in prevalence for women are not found since they are more likely to relapse through their dependence and because girls are taking up smoking at a greater rate than boys. Women are not smoking more to be more like men but because they feel powerless and unable to change their cultural, social and political and economic environments. The results are based on 516 Smoking Patterns test questionnaires which produce a picture of an individual's smoking motivations based on seven factors.

Citation

Batten, L. (1986), "Smoking Motivations and Cessation Rates: An Analysis of Gender‐Based Differences", Equal Opportunities International, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 22-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb010454