查看文章

Regret may be a key variable in understanding the experience of smokers, the vast majority of whom continue to smoke while desiring to quit. We present data from the baseline wave (October-December 2002) of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Survey, a random-digit-dialed telephone survey of a cohort of over 8,000 adult smokers across four countries—Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia—to estimate the prevalence of regret and to identify its predictors. The proportion of smokers who agreed or agreed strongly with the statement “If you had to do it over again, you would not have started smoking” was extremely high—about 90%—and nearly identical across the four countries. Regret was more likely to be experienced by older smokers, women, those who had tried to quit more often, those who perceived quitting as conferring benefits, those with higher levels of …