Article Text
Abstract
Background Although social smoking has increased among young adults, it remains a poorly understood behaviour. The authors explored how young adult social smokers viewed and defined smoking and the strategies they used to reconcile their conflicting smoker and non-smoker identities. The authors also examined alcohol's role in facilitating social smoking and investigated measures that would decouple drinking and smoking.
Methods The authors conducted 13 in-depth interviews with young adult social smokers aged between 19 and 25 years and used thematic analysis to interpret the transcripts.
Results The authors identified four key themes: the demarcation strategies social smokers used to avoid classifying themselves as smokers, social smoking as a tactic that ameliorates the risk of alienation, alcohol as a catalyst of social smoking and the difficulty participants experienced in reconciling their identity as non-smokers who smoke.
Conclusions Although social smokers regret smoking, their retrospective remorse was insufficient to promote behaviour change, and environmental modifications appear more likely to promote smoke-free behaviours among social smokers. Participants strongly supported extending the smoke-free areas outside bars, a measure that would help decouple their alcohol-fuelled behaviours from the identity to which they aspire.
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Footnotes
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Funding RS was supported by funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand grant number 09/195R.
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Competing interests Although we do not consider it a competing interest, for the sake of full disclosure, we note that JH, NM, PG and RE have undertaken work for the New Zealand Ministry of Health; JH, PG and RE have also undertaken work for tobacco control NGOs and have received funding for tobacco control research from the Health Research Council of New Zealand.
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Ethics approval Ethics approval was provided by Department of Marketing Ethics Administrator using delegated authority from University of Otago Ethics Committee.
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Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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Data sharing statement Our ethics approval states that the data will only be available to members of the immediate research team.