Smoking-related thoughts and microbehaviours, and their predictive power for quitting

Negative attitudes to smoking are well-established predictors of intentions to quit and quit behaviours, but less attention has been given to whether quitting is influenced by smoking-related thoughts and microbehaviours that reflect a concern about smoking.

This paper aimed to describe the occurrence of smoking-related thoughts and microbehaviours among Chinese smokers, and to examine their predictive power for making quit attempts and sustained abstinence.

The data came from the first three waves of the International Tobacco Control China Survey. Four measures of recent thoughts about smoking and two microbehaviour measures (collectively referred to as microindicators) were examined.

Most smokers (around three-quarters) reported thinking about harms of smoking to themselves or to others at least occasionally, and an increasing minority reported the two microbehaviours of prematurely butting out cigarettes and forgoing them. All microindicators were positively related to subsequent quit attempts in individual predictor analyses, but only serious thoughts about quitting and butting out cigarettes had independent relationships. Overall, there was no clear relationship between these microindicators and sustained abstinence.

There was a moderately high level of occurrence of recent smoking-related thoughts and microbehaviours among the Chinese adult smokers in the six cities studied. Like in the West, microindicators of concern about smoking were positively associated with subsequent quit attempts, but unlike in the West, they were largely unrelated to sustained abstinence.