Social smokers' management of conflicted identities

Background Although social smoking has increased among young adults, it remains a poorly understood behaviour. The authors explored how young adult social smokers viewed and defined smoking and the strategies they used to reconcile their conflicting smoker and nonsmoker identities. The authors also examined alcohol's role in facilitating social smoking and investigated measures that would decouple drinking and smoking. Methods The authors conducted 13 in-depth interviews with young adult social smokers aged between 19 and 25 years and used thematic analysis to interpret the transcripts. Results The authors identified four key themes: the demarcation strategies social smokers used to avoid classifying themselves as smokers, social smoking as a tactic that ameliorates the risk of alienation, alcohol as a catalyst of social smoking and the difficulty participants experienced in reconciling their identity as non-smokers who smoke. Conclusions Although social smokers regret smoking, their retrospective remorse was insufficient to promote behaviour change, and environmental modifications appear more likely to promote smoke-free behaviours among social smokers. Participants strongly supported extending the smoke-free areas outside bars, a measure that would help decouple their alcohol-fuelled behaviours from the identity to which they aspire.