The Pattern of Smoking among a Sample of Tehranian Citizens

Smoking is one of the most important threatening factors of health and the most common cause of mortality in the world. One of the important strategies to controll it is the recognition of its consumption pattern among individuals. According to this necessity, the present study has identified the pattern of smoking among Tehrani citizens with a combination of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (qualitative content analysis) methodologies in form of convergence. The statistical sample consisted of two groups: the first group) 610 citizens using tobacco control programs in the non-smoking week in 22 districts of Tehran's municipality, selected by a combination of multi-stage cluster, systematic random and convenience sampling strategies. The second group) 53 experts related to «Tobacco-Free Tehran Programme», were selected by simple random sampling strategy. The findings showed that citizens have the following five main categories of tobacco smoking: heavy smoker, daily smoker, occasional smoker, ex-smoker, and never smoker/passive smoker. Smoking in Tehran expriences five mainstream including become young, become hookah, become gendered, become family, and become non-class of consumption. Also, multiple cultural (wrong culture of forgetting problems especially in adults, lack of complete and correct knowledge of consumers about the dangers of smoking), social (social pressure, fashion), psychological (relieving fatigue, avoiding sadness, smoking addiction, relieving stress, feeling magnitude and personality) and individual factors (having experience, more attractiveness) were the main reasons for smoking by citizens. The results indicate that smoking in different groups does not follow the same pattern, and depending on the structural, family and interpersonal conditions, people have different motivations to use it.