“They Don't Live in My House Every Day”: How Understanding Lives Can Aid Understandings of Smoking

Abstract

While the prevalence of smoking in Western countries has substantially reduced following the introduction of comprehensive tobacco control programs, reduction strategies such as the introduction of smokefree legislation, media campaigns, and individual and group support for people trying to quit have been less successful with people living on low incomes, suggesting the need for new ways to engage with people who smoke. We argue that rather than focusing solely on researching smoking behaviors to generate new understandings of why people smoke, people working in the broad area of public health should look more widely at peoples' lives in order to understand their smoking. Using a biographical, narrative perspective as part of a wider ethnographic study of 12 families living in one community within Liverpool in 2006, we argue that understandings that position smoking purely as a harmful, deviant behavior fail to capture the cultural complexity of the lives of smokers and the changing place and meaning of cigarettes over a person's lifetime, and may explain why smokers fail to engage with smoking cessation services and continue to smoke.