Health Education Research Advance Access originally published online on August 2, 2006
Health Education Research 2006 21(5):674-687; doi:10.1093/her/cyl071
Smoking status moderates the contribution of social-cognitive and environmental determinants to adolescents' smoking intentions
Research Group for Stress, Health and Well-being, Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium
*Correspondence to: A. Victoir. E-mail: An.Victoir{at}psy.kuleuven.be
In this study, it was tested whether attitudes, self-efficacy, social influences and the perception of the school and home environments had different associations with intentions for adolescent non-smokers, occasional smokers and daily smokers. A regression model allowing for separate slopes of social-cognitive and environment variables accounted for 72% of the variation in intentions. For non-smokers, ease of refusing to smoke (ß = –0.06) and social influences favouring smoking (ß = 0.05) were linked to intentions. Occasional and daily smokers' intentions were associated with health consequences (ß = –0.05 and ß = –0.06, respectively) and ease of smoking/buying cigarettes (ß = 0.05 and ß = 0.24, respectively). Social influences favouring smoking (ß = 0.10) were also associated with intentions in daily smokers. In an extended model for current smokers (adjusted R2 = 0.45), context-cued nicotine cravings (ß = 0.27) were linked to daily smokers', but not occasional smokers' intentions. The results suggest that motivating adolescents to abstain from or to quit smoking implies working on different combinations of determinants in non-smokers, occasional smokers and daily smokers. Interventions for daily smokers should supplement motivational techniques with stratagems that allow smokers to reduce the number of cravings they experience in specific contexts.