An ecological view of cigarette smoking.

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the implications of an ecological model of smoking behavior. The model derives from the thinking of epidemiologists about the nature of the causes of disease and from the kind of theorizing about behavior which has been common in social psychology in the last generation. Figure 1, drawn from the volume on smoking behavior which has reported most of our preliminary work (Mausner & Platt, 1971), shows the basic character of this model. There are three components: input (i.e., environment), mediating systems, and output (i.e., behavior). The input is specified in terms of three aspects of the environment: biological, social, and physical. Although these three may be distinguished conceptually, their interrelations sometimes make the distinction hard to apply in the real world. In the brackets are found theoretical constructs. And last, to the right under outputs, are a variety of measurable behaviors. The implications of this model for two areas related to smoking behavior are explored in this article. The first is the study of change in smoking among individual smokers. The second is an analysis of society's reactions to the problems of smoking. The rationale for our entire discussion is the assumption, first, that an understanding of an individual's smoking is impossible without a clear picture of the role that smoking behavior plays in his entire life pattern. Second is the assumption that we cannot understand the smoking behavior of 1 The research reported in the paper was carried out under Grant TH4 from the American Cancer