The New Zealand Government has committed to the goal of New Zealand becoming ‘smokefree’ (smoking prevalence of less than 5%) by 2025. To achieve this it is important to reduce initiation of smoking as well as encourage quitting. Participants in the Health Promotion Agency’s (HPA’s) Youth Insights Survey (YIS) were asked whether they thought it would be difficult for someone to quit smoking once they had started.
Methodology
Participants in the 2012 YIS were asked whether they thought it would be difficult for someone to quit smoking once they had started. Responses to this question were examined by:
- smoking status
- susceptibility to smoking
- ethnicity
- gender
- parental smoking status
- past-year quit attempts
- recall of tobacco control advertising
- frequency of seeing Smoking Not Our Future (SNOF) advertising or messages.
When looking at the differences by ethnicity, parental smoking status, recall of smokefree advertising and frequency of seeing SNOF advertising, we have controlled for individual smoking status. This means that we take into account whether or not a respondent smokes, to ensure that any differences found are not due to respondents’ own smoking status. Statistically significant (p < .05) differences between groups are reported.
Perceptions of quitting difficulty were also assessed in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Further analyses of these data were undertaken to examine changes over time.
Key Results
- Eight in 10 young people thought it would definitely or probably be difficult for someone to quit smoking once they had started.
- Young people who had never smoked were more likely to think that quitting would be difficult compared with those who currently smoked or had smoked in the past. Females were also more likely than males to think that quitting would be difficult.
- Young people who had been exposed to smokefree advertising in the past 30 days, or had seen SNOF advertisements or messages in the past year, were more likely to think that quitting would be difficult than those who had not.