Two-month follow-up on callers to a telephone quit smoking service

The results of a 2-month follow-up on a sample of individuals who rang a telephone quit smoking service to get advice on how to quit smoking are reported. Calls were in response to large-scale media campaigns carried out in Victoria each year from 1984 through 1986. The calls to the service came more from women than men and tended to come from better educated white collar workers. There were few differences in short-term quit rates as a function of basic demographic variables. There was some evidence that after 3 years of campaigning a greater proportion of telephone service users were making a major effort to quit and that younger smokers at whom the campaign was directed were more likely to quit.