Perceived Risk and Worry For One's Partner and Self Correlate With Desire to Quit in Dual-Smoker Couples

Among smokers, the desire to quit smoking is often related to one's health concerns. However, much less is known about how perceptions of health concerns are related in couples in which both partners smoke (i.e., dual smoker couples) and their associations with desire to quit for self. We explored these issues using baseline survey data collected from 63 dual smoker couples recruited from the community in central North Carolina. Participants were aged 21 to 67 (M = 43.0, SD = 11.3) and had been smoking for 4 to 51 years (M = 22.9, SD = 11.3) with an average of 17 (SD = 8.8) cigarettes per day. Within couples, partners exhibited similar beliefs about worry about physical harm of smoking for oneself (r = .30, p < .05) and partner (r = .30, p < .05), perceived risk of disease for self (r = .26, p < .05) and partner (r = .24, p < .05), and desire that their partner quit (r = .34, p < .01). Individuals' desire to quit was related to their own perceived risk of disease (r = .34, p < .05) and worry about harm (r = .47, p < .001). Further, own desire to quit was related to worry about partner's health (r = .29, p < .01), perceived risk of partner getting a disease if they continued to smoke (r = .39, p < .001), and belief that their smoking has caused partner physical harm (r = .38, p < .001). Participants had an extremely strong desire (78% = 7 on 1–7 scale) for their partner's help if they were to quit smoking. These data show 1) there is significant concordance in partners' rating of risk of disease and worry; and 2) an individual's desire to quit is related to both one's perceptions of risk and worry of harm for self but also importantly perceptions of risk, and worry of harm for the partner. Interventions that highlight how smoking harms a couple may be a fruitful, yet currently underutilized, method to increase cessation in dual smoker couples, a high risk group with lower cessation rates and higher relapse rates.