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Some issues in Smoking Modification Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2009

Martin Raw
Affiliation:
Research Clinical Psychologist, Addiction Research Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, London.

Extract

Behavioural psychotherapists have contributed an enormous amount of research to the problem of smoking; The attraction of smoking as a research field is fairly easy to see. Smokers constitute a high proportion of the adult population of most industrialised countries. A large, reasonably homogeneous subject pool is therefore readily available for research, and since so many smokers claim a desire to stop smoking (McKennell and Thomas 1967), they are ideal for clinical research. In addition the behaviour itself is easy to measure and it is fairly easy to demonstrate behaviour change as a result of therapeutic intervention. Smoking lends itself readily to analysis using the concepts of behavioural psychology, and because such large populations of smokers are always available for therapeutic research, the application of traditional experimental methodology (based upon controlled group comparisons with random allocation of subjects to groups) is quite easy. Despite these apparently favourable conditions, relatively little progress has been made in terms of therapeutic success rates (Bernstein 1969, Bernstein and McAlister 1975). The purpose of this paper is to suggest some reasons for this, and to suggest that behavioural psychotherapists still have a very important role to play in the smoking withdrawal field.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies 1975

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