Modification of a smoking motivation questionnaire for Chinese medical students.
BACKGROUND
Smoking prevalence among the medical students is high in China. Therefore, understanding the smoking motivations of medical students is crucial for smoking control, but currently there are no scales questionnaires customized for probing the smoking motivations of medical students. This aim of study was to test and modify a questionnaire for investigating smoking motivations among medical students.


METHODS
A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1,125 medical students at Xuzhou Medical College in China in 2012.The model fit and validity was assessed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the reliability was tested by single-item reliability, composite reliability, and item-total correlation.


RESULTS
The prevalence of smoking was 9.84 % among study population. In the modified scales, the global fit indices identified a CFI value of 0.96, TLI was 0.96, and the RMSEA was 0.063. CFA supported the two dimensional structure of the instrument. The average variance extracted ranged from 0.45 to 0.62. All single-item reliability scores were greater than 0.20, and the composite reliability ranged from 0.74 to 0.91.


CONCLUSIONS
Modified scales could be the preliminary instrument used in evaluating the smoking motivations of medical students. However, it should be further assessed using other forms and methods of validity and reliability, additional motivations of smoking, and the survey of other medical colleges in China.
School of Public Health, Wannan Medical College, Wuhu, China E-mail wyf@wnmc.edu.cn.
Chao
C
Jiang
Wen-Jie
WJ
Sun
Yan-Chun
YC
Wan
Ming-Wei
MW
Wei
Yong-Ping
YP
Mu
Siobhan L
SL
Tarver
Yong-Qing
YQ
Gao
Tian
T
Hu
Chao
C
Xu
James
J
Gordon
Cindy Xin
CX
Feng
Yu-Feng
YF
Wen
D002681:China / Q000453:epidemiology; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D015995:Prevalence; D011594:Psychometrics; D012907:Smoking / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires