Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #112245

Alison Lynne Shigaki, MD, Patient Care, International Community Health Services, 7116 Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, Seattle, WA 98118, Clarence Spigner, DrPH, MPH, Department of Health Services, University of Washington, Box 357660, Seattle, WA 98195, Bu Huang, PhD, School of Social Work, University of Washington, 4101 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105, and Shin-Ping Tu, MD, MPH, Division of General Internal Medicine, Harborview Medical Center, Box 359780, 325 Ninth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104, 206-731-4236, shinping@u.washington.edu.

National surveys suggest a low prevalence of cigarette smoking in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) population, but smoking rates for AAPI men are significantly higher when data is disaggregated for ethnicity and gender. There exist few published studies on culturally competent cessation programs exclusively for the AAPI community. Through a three-year American Legacy Foundation grant, we developed a tobacco cessation program specifically designed for Chinese and Vietnamese adult men in Seattle, Washington. In order to further assure cultural competency in our cessation program, a 28-item telephone questionnaire was developed in English, translated into Chinese and Vietnamese and then back translated to ensure accuracy. Names of potential participants, Chinese and Vietnamese adult males who were former or current smokers, were obtained from a tobacco database at a community clinic in Seattle. A total of 192 Chinese and 191 Vietnamese men were interviewed by telephone. Questions included methods that former smokers felt helped them quit smoking as well as what current and former smokers felt would help them to quit. Demographic variables, such as age, gender, birth country, marital status, education, years lived in the US, language fluency, occupation and health status, are compared and contrasted with tobacco-related behaviors such as number of cigarettes smoked, and attitude about quitting. Preliminary findings include differences between Chinese and Vietnamese men, and suggest that occupation and years lived in the U.S. may be major factors in tobacco behavior and should be considered as integral in the design of a cessation program.

Learning Objectives:

• 1. To suggest meaningful ways in which cultural competency can be built into a process of developing a tobacco cessation program.
• 2. To show how existing data sources can be employed to help identify and recruit community-levels participants in a health education program.
• 3 To discuss factors that may influence tobacco behavior in Chinese and Vietnamese men.

Keywords: Tobacco, Asian Americans

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.