Dawning Dependence: Processes underlying smoking cessation in adolescence

During adolescence young people are known to try out a range of risk behaviours, including smoking. Even though the detrimental health consequences of smoking are well known, the prevalence of smoking among Dutch adolescents remains high. Until today, efforts to control adolescent smoking are mainly focused on the prevention of smoking, whereas fewer efforts are made towards facilitating smoking cessation. Since the chance of a successful attempt to cease smoking diminishes the longer that people smoke, it is important that cessation interventions also focus on adolescents. However, compared to the many reports on predictors of smoking initiation, the literature addressing adolescent smoking cessation is rather limited, and the field is still considered to be underdeveloped. To facilitate the planning and development of programs to promote cessation among adolescents who smoke, the current thesis presents a number of studies that focus on identifying and studying potential determinants of smoking cessation, as well as determinants of important parameters of successful cessation such as readiness to quit smoking and undertaking quit attempts. Multiple levels of influence on the process of adolescent smoking cessation are considered and tested, including addiction, psychological and environmental factors. In addition, predictions and assumptions of several theories that are frequently used in explaining health behaviour, such as the Transtheoretical Model and Social Cognitive Theory, were tested in their applications to adolescent smoking cessation.

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