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  • Individual-level factors associated with intentions to quit smoking among adult smokers in six cities of China: findings from the ITC China Survey

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Research paper
Individual-level factors associated with intentions to quit smoking among adult smokers in six cities of China: findings from the ITC China Survey
  1. Guoze Feng1,
  2. Yuan Jiang1,
  3. Qiang Li1,
  4. Hua-Hie Yong2,
  5. Tara Elton-Marshall3,
  6. Jilan Yang4,
  7. Lin Li2,
  8. Natalie Sansone3,
  9. Geoffrey T Fong3
  1. 1Tobacco Control Office, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China
  2. 2VicHealth Centre for Tobacco Control, The Cancer Council Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
  3. 3Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
  4. 4Department of Health Studies and Gerontology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
  1. Correspondence to Guoze Feng, Tobacco Control Office, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 Nanwei Road, Beijing 100050, P R China; fengguoze{at}hotmail.com

Abstract

Background Over 350 million smokers live in China, and this represents nearly one-third of the smoking population of the world. Smoking cessation is critically needed to help reduce the harms and burden caused by smoking-related diseases. It is therefore important to identify the determinants of quitting and of quit intentions among smokers in China. Such knowledge would have potential to guide future tobacco control policies and programs that could increase quit rates in China.

Objective To identify the correlates of intentions to quit smoking among a representative sample of adult smokers in six cities in China.

Methods Data from wave 1 (2006) of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project China Survey, a face-to-face survey of adult Chinese smokers in six cities: Beijing, Shenyang, Shanghai, Changsha, Guangzhou and Yinchuan, was analysed. Households were sampled using a stratified multistage design. About 800 smokers were surveyed in each selected city (total n=4815).

Results Past quit attempts, duration of past attempts, Heaviness of Smoking Index (HSI), outcome expectancy of quitting, worry about future health and overall opinion of smoking were found to be independently associated with intentions to quit smoking, but demographic characteristics were not.

Conclusions The determinants of quit intentions among smokers in China are fairly similar to those found among smokers in Western countries, despite the fact that interest in quitting is considerably lower among Chinese smokers. Identifying the determinants of quit intentions provides possibilities for shaping effective policies and programs for increasing quitting among smokers in China.

  • Smoking cessation
  • surveillance and monitoring
  • China
  • addiction
  • cessation
  • surveillance and monitoring

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.

https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.2010.037093

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    Footnotes

    • Funding The ITC China Project was supported by grants from the US National Cancer Institute (R01 CA125116 and the Roswell Park Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (P50 CA111236)), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (79551), Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. The funding sources had no role in the study design, in collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval This study was conducted with the approval of the Ethics approval was obtained from the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Canada) and the internal review boards at: Roswell Park Cancer Institute (Buffalo, USA), the Cancer Council Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Beijing, China).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.