"Personality and Smoking" Study

slavica

Hi Everyone,

I am conducting research for my research course at York University,
Toronto. I need participants who are smokers, occasional smokers, or
ex-smokers. If you are a smoker, occasional smoker or ex-smoker, and
you would like to help, please visit the link where the questionnaire is
posted. I do not collect any personal information, so your responses
will stay anonymous and confidential.

http://www.sodata.com/questionnaire.html


I appreciate your help.

Thank you.

<edited by mod>

Feel free to do the questionnaire but the study appears to be finished. The original poster has put an explanation of what the study was about below in post 14 below for those interested.

Also to the original poster - if you want people to continue completing the questionnaire so you can obtain more results then let me know and I can edit this appropriately.

Downtime

Done and done

Scoops

Done and answered honestly as well!

Zulu

done. ...even if I felt I was repeating myself again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and...

slavica

Thanks for helping out. I can't tell you a lot about my hypothesis at this point, but I'll let you know more once I collect all my data.

As for repetition, that's the thing with questionnaires. Sometimes they seem to be asking the same question over and over again, but they measure different things.

Once again, thanks.

marie_85

Done... just cos I'm proud of giving up smoking. Wanted somewhere to show it off.

Eoghan-psych

slavica wrote:

As for repetition, that's the thing with questionnaires. Sometimes they seem to be asking the same question over and over again, but they measure different things.

Indeed - face validity only stretches so far. People look at questionnaires as a series of questions to which the researcher must be seeking answers, whereas the researcher is interested in statistical patterns.

The bad part about questionnaires is that once you know what they are [the EPQ for example, or the general health one] then you can basically create a statistical pattern in your answers. Every time I'm handed an EPQ I'm tempted to ramp up my L and N scores and suppress my P score, just to mess up any correlation with anxiety measures. But then I remember that the researcher [one of the other postgrads] knows my participant number by heart, and she'd murderlise me for messing up her data so I don't.

As an aside - are you doing the MRes course?

slavica

There's definitely a downside to questionnaires. People sometimes want to look good, although there are no bad or good answers. But since researchers don't collect personal information, the hope is that participants will answer the questions honestly.

I am not doing the MRes course. I am completing my undergraduate degree in psychology at York University, Toronto, Canada. This research is a part of the program, that is, I have to do it in order to graduate. After I graduate, I plan to continue my education is social work field.

Jeeves

Just a quick comment on your questionnaire, i recently freed myself from smoking and i subscribed to the Allen Carr method of freeing myself. I am not here to plug his book but i do wish to point out that in my opinion and experience that the largest obstacle about freeing myself; is ridding myself of the propaganda and pure bull**** fed to me by anti-smoking agencies, the medical profession and other deluded professions. Freeing yourself is 95% mental and a very small 5% physical, in my opinion (which i wish to make clear is how, i personally feel. I would not be so arrogant as to vouch for all smokers but i believe my feelings are very similiar to the majority) it is very much mind over matter. It is not rational or logical to breath such toxins in. Just sit with an open relaxed mind, take your time and look at someone smoking its just not natural. Its not hard to give up (i dont wish to come across here as smug as i had been on that side of the fence for a very long time), dont listen to the propaganda please, i feel that patches are only there to torture and make you feel deprived of something you dont need or want once you opened your mind. The body is a marvellous green machine that doesnt need nicotine, its just not meant to be there.

How can the anti smoking agencies and the medical profession wish to help people by scaring people half to death with health warnings (enter the pressure factor -seriously this only makes things worse we know already) and with the same breath tell smokers how hard it is to rid yourself of this affliction and that they will need weening of the drug by simply delaying the process with awful looking stickers attached to your arm.

My point is stopping smoking is a mind game, there is no physical pain in stopping, maybe a slight irritation in day one and two the rest is what you make of the process , smokers dont need the drug ,just countless years of brainwashing makes them believe they do. I wish the medical profession would concentrate in this field, and adjust mindsets not feed fleeing prisoners with a toxin that is not meant to be there thus making ex smokers feel deprived when they are actually so much better off.

Archeron

Survey donediddlydone.
Just an opinion, I think the list of ways you accomplish giving up smoking could be a little more enhanced. I personally used hypnotism succesfully, but entered it as cold turkey because it wasnt patches or cigarette reduction, I just stopped immediately after the therapy. I dont if it would distort your answers, but it might give a better idea on HOW people are stopping.

qwertyphobia

Zulu wrote:

done. ...even if I felt I was repeating myself again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and...

well you will have scored highly on the smokers have low patenience questions

slavica

Jeeves, thanks for your comments. I do agree that quitting smoking is a mind game. Physical addiction, when it comes to smoking, is nothing compared to psychological addiction. Health warnings are scary, and most current smokers try to ignore them, but they might be working. When you compare some countries that don't have such approach to quitting smoking, smoking rates are much higher. But on the individual level, the method you used seems interesting, and probably alleviates the pressure and fear of the health warnings, which might be a less stressful path to quitting, and in such way, more successful.

Archeron, I think you are right there. My original question had three choices, and the third choice was "other methods". I removed that choice since I could not use the correlation with more than two choices. I offered those two choices since I thought they cover most of the quitting methods smokers use. However, I should have just offered: 1) cold turkey, and 2) other methods.

Wurly

You may want to jumble the questions that 'seem' the same around a little. I sense that this is based on the MMPI technique and the repetitiveness of the MMPI questions are a lot more subtle than the ones on yours.

slavica

Hello everyone,

I want to thank everybody who participated in my questionnaire. My study was about perfectionism, stress and smoking. I was interested primarily if there is any connection between negative aspects of perfectionism and continuation of smoking, so I compared current and former smokers on a Discrepancy perfectionism subscale, which represents negative aspect of perfectionism, the perception that one consistently fails to meet his/her standards. The two scales I used are “Almost perfect scale-Revised” and “Perceived Stress Scale”. If anyone is interested you can find the scales on the internet at http://www.ed.psu.edu/cecprs/fac_bios/apsr.pdf and http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~scohen/ , PSS English, 14 Items.

Since perfectionism has been implicated in many maladaptive behaviors, I was interested to see whether there is a link between smoking and perfectionism. I also wanted to compare the stress levels between current and former smokers, and whether people who experience higher stress levels score higher on the Discrepancy subscale.

After I analyzed my data, I found no relationship between Discrepancy subscale and smoking. Current and former smokers did not have different scores on this measure. I also found unusual negative correlation between number of cigarettes smoked per day and perceived stress, where r = -.297, p<.001. Most of the earlier research found that stress increases with the number of cigarettes smoked per day. I also found no difference in stress levels between current and former smokers.
I found a significant correlation between Discrepancy and Perceived Stress, r = .533, p<.001, which means that people who experience more stress have higher scores on the measure of negative aspects of perfectionism.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, and if you have any questions, you can contact me at slavica1@yorku.ca.

Zillah

Thats quite interesting. Although, if you've stopped collecting data, you should probably disable the questionaire. I did it without reading the whole thread only to realise you had already analysed the data.

biko

Just did the thing in vain. Mods, could you add to first post study is over?