The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: Young adults are an understudied and notoriously difficult to reach population. Getting young adults to even think about quitting smoking is challenging. As such, additional efforts to identify the key factors that motivate young adults to think about cessation are needed. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) provides a useful theoretical framework to investigate the motivational structure for smoking cessation. In addition, we hypothesize that individuals' cultural orientations influence their perceptions regarding the importance of social norms governing cessation. Thus, we investigate how independent and interdependent cultural orientations, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control about cessation interact to determine intentions to quit smoking among young adult smokers.

Methods: This study is based on a self-administered survey of 286 current smokers at University of Hawaii at Manoa. Survey respondents were between the ages of 18 and 25, and a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds were represented in the sample. We used structural equation modeling to test the study hypotheses.

Results: Overall, the findings support the validity of the TPB. As predicted, perceived behavioral control and subjective norms were significantly related to the intention to quit smoking. However, attitude toward quitting failed to predict intention to quit smoking. The results also support that cultural orientations play a role in determining intention to quit smoking. Interdependent orientation was linked to subjective norms which predicted intention to quit smoking. Independence orientation was linked to perceived behavioral control which predicted intention to quit smoking. Implications of the findings will be discussed.