Development of a Smoking Abstinence Self-efficacy Questionnaire

# The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Background Self-efficacy beliefs are an important determi-nant of (changes in) health behaviors. In the area of smoking cessation, there is a need for a short, feasible, and validated questionnaire measuring self-efficacy beliefs regarding smoking cessation. Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the psychometric properties of a six-item questionnaire to assess smoking cessation self-efficacy. Methods We used longitudinal data from a smoking cessa-tion study. A total of 513 smokers completed the Smoking Abstinence Self-efficacy Questionnaire (SASEQ) and ques-tionnaires assessing depressive symptoms and motivation to quit smoking. After that, they set a quit date and attempted to stop smoking. One year after the quit date, smoking status of participants was assessed by self report. The psychomet-ric properties of the SASEQ were studied and we investi-gated whether SASEQ scores predicted successful smoking cessation. Results Factor analysis yielded one factor, with an Eigen-value of 3.83, explaining 64 % of variance. All factor load-ings were ≥0.73. We found a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89 for the SASEQ, low correlations for the SASEQ with depres-sive symptoms, and motivation to quit, indicating that self-efficacy is measured independently of these concepts. Fur-thermore, high baseline SASEQ scores significantly pre-dicted smoking abstinence at 52 weeks after the quit date (OR01.85; 95 % CI01.20~2.84). Conclusions The SASEQ appeared to be a short, reliable, and valid questionnaire to assess self-efficacy beliefs regard-ing smoking abstinence. In the present study, this instrument also had good predictive validity. The short SASEQ can easily be used in busy clinical practice to guide smoking cessation interventions