HOW NON-DAILY SMOKERS RESPOND TO MEASURES OF TOBACCO DEPENDENCE

Recent estimates show that there are approximately 9.3 million non-daily smokers in the United States, and that this population of smokers is growing, even as the number of daily smoker’s decreases (Jamal et al., 2015). In spite of low scores on measures of tobacco dependence (Shiffman et al., 2012ab; Shiffman et al., 2012c), non-daily smokers struggle to quit smoking and frequently relapse (Shiffman et al., 2012c). Tobacco dependence measures predict relapse with varying degrees of success (Courvoisier & Etter, 2010). There is evidence that certain response patterns on dependence measures can predict relapse (Piasecki et al., 2010). It is not known how well tobacco dependence measures predict long-term abstinence among non-daily smokers, who constitute a large (9.3 million) and growing segment of cigarette smokers in the United States (Jamal et al., 2015). The current study used agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to analyze the responses of non-daily cigarette smokers on a set of tobacco dependence questions from The Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) research study. The aims of this study were to: (1) identify the existence of subgroups based upon response patterns, and (2) examine whether certain response patterns among non-daily smokers predict smoking status at a one year follow up point. Cluster analysis results placed the vast majority (95%) of the sample into one group, indicating that non-daily smokers are a homogenous group in terms of dependence items.