Attitudes Towards Smoking In Public
Uploaded by SamSkillz on Dec 21, 2004
Attitudes Towards Smoking In Public
Shore, Ted H, Tashchian, Armen & Adams, Janet S (2000). Development and validation of a scale measuring attitudes toward smoking. Journal of Social Psychology, 140 : 5, 615-623
The topic of the article I have chosen deals with smoking, and the attitudes of smokers and nonsmokers towards smoking in public places. Legislators have brought many laws into effect that restrict smoking in many public places. These laws and restrictions have caused much contraversy about the rights of smokers and nonsmokers. Each person has their own opinion about smoking. Smoking poses a serious health risk to smokers, and also to their rivals, nonsmokers. Many things have been done to try to help smokers stop smoking. It has been clearly proved that a serious behavior change is needed by the smoker to ever quit smoking. Over the years, peoples ideas about smoking has changed a great deal. As people learned more and more about the health risks, smoking has become a major concern on many peoples minds. This has resulted in many changes reguarding smoking in public places. In the experiments carried out by these psychologists, they found that smokers and nonsmokers have very strong opinions which usually differ greatly. The psychologists used a questionnaire to retrieve peoples opinions on smoking in the first experiment. They used the questionnaire on a group of 7th and 8th grade Chinese students. In this questionnaire they found that Chinese students had a more positive attitude toward smoking than did students in the United States. In 1989, two psychologists used a telephone survey to study public opinions of smoking. They found that smokers were more against public smoking restrictions and tobacco sales taxes than nonsmokers were. Also, psychologists used a telephone survey in Illinois and North Carolina. They found that the results were the same. They concluded that self-interests were related to attitudes toward smoking restrictions and tobacco sales. In another experiment among several hundred college students, some smokers and some nonsmokers, many conclusions were made. Smokers said that "cigarette companies should be able to advertise their products in any way they wish." Nonsmokers held more negative attitudes towards smoking, they favored laws restricting the use of tobacco products in public places. Nonsmokers were also more concerned with the...