The purpose of this investigation was to study whether smokers and nonsmokers hold systematically different attitudes on tobacco smoking. Twenty-seven smoking-related Likert type attitude items were selected for analysis from a longer questionnaire that had been administered to sixty-one smoking and 246 nonsmoking college students at the University of New Hampshire. Both smokers and nonsmokers expressed highly similar unfavorable attitudes toward smoking but nonsmokers expressed those attitudes more strongly. With few exceptions the findings were found to hold over a considerable heterogeneity of item content. The hypothesis was generated that if investigators seek to find differences between smokers' and nonsmokers' attitudes that diverge from neutrality or uncertainty in different directions, they will for the most part fail. However, if they seek to find differences in the strength of such attitudes that are in the same direction of divergence, they will for the most part succeed.
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