Smoking behavior and nicotine addiction among security guards

Abstract

The objectives of this descriptive research were to study smoking behaviors, nicotine addiction of security guards at Naresuan University, and to compare nicotine addiction between the regular and occasional smokers. The samples of 133 security guards working at Naresuan University, was systematic randomly selected. The research instrument was a questionnaire on smoking behavior and Fargerstrom nicotine dependence. The content validity index of smoking behavior questionnaire was 0.95. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the nicotine dependence questionnaire was 0.80. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and Fisher’s exact test. The result revealed that security guards were regular smoker (43.61%) occasional smoker (9.77 %) and ex-smoker (at least a year ago) (14.28 %). The percentage of smokers who had nicotine addiction at the low-level, medium-level, and high-level, were 77.47, 16.90, and 5.63 respectively. There were no statistically significant differences in nicotine addiction between the regular and occasional smokers at p > .05.