Psychological network analysis of the relations between beliefs about smoking for smokers with and without a recent quit attempt

Abstract

Objective

Psychological network analysis was used to evaluate the relations between beliefs about cigarette smoking in current smokers with and without a recent quit attempt and determine if these networks differed in global strength (how strongly beliefs are related) or global structure (which beliefs are related).

Design

Using two publicly available datasets, the California Smokers’ Cohort (CSC; N = 933) and Wave 1 of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH; N = 7855), we evaluated differences in global strength and global structure of the beliefs held by current smokers with and without a recent quit attempt.

Main Outcome Measures

Strength and structure of networks generated for current smokers with and without a recent quit attempt.

Results

In the CSC dataset there were differences between smokers with and without a recent quit attempt in global structure and marginal differences in global strength; the PATH dataset suggested small differences in global strength and structure.

Conclusion

The present study suggests that consideration of relations among smoking beliefs may be a valuable contribution to characterizing smoking beliefs when assessing smoking quit attempts.

Keywords:

• Smoking
• attitude structure
• network analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the UC San Diego Library Digital Collections at https://doi.org/10.6075/J0W37T8Q and in the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program at http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36498.v8.

Notes

1 The possibility of comparing networks based on future quit intentions, rather than past quit behaviors, arose during the review process. We examined networks based on this distinction, but minimal differences emerged. For a full summary of these additional results, see SM section 1.5.

2 As with the CSC data, we compared networks based on future quit intentions. In the PATH dataset, there were few differences in network structure based on future quit intentions (see SM section 2.8). The larger sample size in PATH also allowed us to group individuals based on duration of most recent quit attempt, across which networks rarely differed (see SM section 2.9).