MEASURING ATTITUDES TOWARDS SMOKING IN THE COMMUNITY INTERVENTION TRIAL FOR SMOKING CESSATION (COMMIT)

We present the development of indices using baseline data from the Eva luation Survey for the Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessat ion (COMMIT), The indices are designed to measure two primary attitude constructs that relate to smelting behavior: beliefs about smoking as a public health problem (SPHP); and norms and values concerning smoki ng (NVS), Two general approaches to index construction, the rational m ethod and the factor analytic method, were used, Item analysis suggest ed good internal consistency for both indices (alpha > 0.75), Seven su bconstructs emerged from the factor analysis accounting for 55.0% of t he total variance, The SPHP and NVS items uniquely identify with four factors and three factors, respectively, confirming the validity of th e two indices, Confirmatory factor analyses of a different data set pr ovided further validation, Validity was also assessed by an examinatio n of the relationships between index scores and smoking status, Smoker s reported significantly higher scores than non-smokers on the two mea sures indicating, as anticipated, that smokers have more favorable att itudes towards smoking than non-smokers, These findings suggest that t he two a priori constructs of SPHP and NVS are empirically distinguish able components of attitudes towards smoking, and that the indices dev eloped here are reliable and valid measures of those constructs.