McLean, Jane B. (2010) I smoke, therefore I am: Exploring smoking-related identity, prototype similarity and intention to quit smoking. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Smoking continues to be the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Australia. Therefore, considerable research continues to be directed at understanding smoking behaviour and how to influence smoking cessation attempts. This study was designed to explore the influence of and relationship between some of the social identity factors that are believed to predict intention to quit smoking, in the context of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Participants consisted of 104 current smokers (57 women and 47 men) sourced from a psychology university student pool and from the researcher’s personal social network. They were requested to complete an online questionnaire that was based on previous research and designed specifically for the current study, using a combination of TPB measures and smoking identity, quitting identity and prototypical similarity measures. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that quitting identity and prototype similarity predicted a significant amount of variance in intention to quit smoking, beyond the variance predicted by the original TPB measures (p < .001, f 2 = .63). Out of all the variables, quitting identity was the most significant predictor of intention to quit smoking, providing supporting evidence that a smoker who possesses self-defining values about being a non-smoker is more motivated to quit smoking. Smoking identity did not predict any significant variance, confirming that it is not a predictor of quitting intention. No mediation was found to occur between quitting identity and prototypical similarity. However, an unplanned mediation analysis found that attitude mediated the relationship between quitting identity and quitting intention. This study’s conclusions contribute towards implications for health communication, in confirming that health messages will be most effective when they reach the right person, at the right time. However, the findings could not provide definitive evidence of which identity factors directly influence actual attempts to quit smoking. Therefore, one suggestion for future research is to incorporate a longitudinal aspect to a similar research design, to determine the collective and individual effects of the same variables on actual smoking behaviour and smoking cessation attempts.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Sciences - Department of Psychology (Up to 30 Jun 2013) |
| Supervisors: | Coates, Des |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Science (Honours) (Psychology) |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jan 2026 06:27 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jan 2026 06:27 |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52565 |
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