Health Education Research Advance Access originally published online on March 21, 2005
Health Education Research 2005 20(6):622-634; doi:10.1093/her/cyh026
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Beliefs of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in The Netherlands about smoking cessation: implications for prevention
1 Department of Social Medicine, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, 1100 DE Amsterdam and 2 Department of Health Education and Health Promotion, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands
3 Correspondence to: V. Nierkens; E-mail: v.nierkens{at}amc.uva.nl
Tobacco smoking is a very important preventable cause of mortality and morbidity, and this is also the case in immigrant populations. Therefore, smoking cessation interventions need to take these groups into account. Insight into the applicability of behavioral smoking cessation interventions for non-Western populations is necessary. The objective of our study is to gain insight into the beliefs of smoking cessation in Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in The Netherlands using the I-Change Model. In this model, intention and behavior are supposed to be determined by three types of (psychosocial) factors: attitudes, social influences and self-efficacy expectations. Face-to-face structured interviews among Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were conducted. Results indicate that in contrast to smokers, ex-smokers perceived fewer advantages of smoking and more advantages of smoking cessation. They also perceived less social pressure that encourages smoking (e.g. by being offered cigarettes) and a high self-efficacy of being able to quit. The I-Change Model explained 66% of the observed variance. We conclude that the basic factors identified in social cognition theories were replicated in this study. When developing smoking cessation interventions, the results show that it is important to include ethnic-specific salient beliefs, such as the subjective norms of the religious leader.