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Science Study finds quitting smoking easier in groups
Science Study finds quitting smoking easier in groups | Study finds quitting smoking easier in groups |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Friday, 23 May 2008 | |
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Science DiscussionsThe study “The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Its authors are Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. U.S. social scientist Nicholas Christakis is associated with the Department of Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.); and the Department of Medicine at the Mt. Auburn Hospital and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University (both at Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.). U.S. political scientist James Fowler is associated with the Department of Political Science at the University of California (San Diego, California, U.S.A.). The researchers’ reason for performing this study was to determine patterns in smoking and smoking cessation. According to their abstract, over the past thirty years, the percentage of people smoking in the United States has steadily decreased. Consequently, Christakis and Fowler wanted to find out the “… extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together.” [NEJM study] To accomplish this goal, the researchers studied a network of 12,067 people from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study, which was conducted in association with the National Institute of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Christakis and Fowler found that people who smoked often smoked together as a group, and people who didn’t smoke often were affiliated with others who also didn’t smoke. Specifically, their study discovered that the size of groups of smokers remained the same over this time period from 1971 to 2003. Therefore, the researchers concluded that often entire groups of smokers were quitting together during this period. Smokers, it was also learned, were often found on the edge (the “periphery”) of a social network. More results from the study appear on the next page. |
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