Motivation and behavior: Self-efficacy and social-interaction on smoking cessation

Smoking is a leading cause of death and has imposed enormous public health and financial costs for most countries in this world. It is an addictive behavior that creates hazards for the smokers themselves and people around. Quitting smoking typically requires many attempts.

Self-efficacy – personal belief in one‘s ability to perform a given behavior – has been taken as an effective predictor of individual's smoking cessation. Self-efficacy interacts with social factors such as peer pressure and environmental conditions like access to cessation services.

Previous studies on social interactions and smoking behavior normally targeted on small communities such as schools or specific groups of people like cardiovascular disease patients. And they only explored the linear correlations between smoking behaviors and social interactions. The fact that there were cyclical relationships between smoking initiation and cessation was neglected.

To avoid these shortcomings, we used a population-based, stratified-sampled survey of Taiwanese adults regarding their health behaviors in 2002 as study targets. The survey contains information about smoking behavior and the socio-economic background of the sample, if parents or friends smoked, and if there were supports from friends/relatives or health professionals for the latest cessation.

We then harnessed the analytic strength of Multivariate Probit Model to simultaneously estimate the correlated binary outcomes between the possible pairings of smoking initiation, cessation, peers' pressure, social supports from friends/relatives or healthcare professionals, and cessation success rate.

We strongly believe that our findings will have meaningful implications for clinical and public health efforts to assist smokers quit smoking.