Intention to avoid smoking of Vietnamese adolecent

Abstract

The research of “Intention to avoid smoking of Vietnamese adolescent” was conducted under circumstance that smoking situation has been becoming alarmingly, especially in recent years in Viet Nam. It has a lot of bad effects for people’s health and the question of decreasing smoking is one of the most social and difficult question currently. However, the trend of consumption is changing day by day with the effects of actions from organizations and people in society. In that general trend, the perception of young people on smoking is also changing. This study is conducted to test the ability of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to predict Vietnamese adolescent’s intention to avoid smoking and the subsequent behavior. A prospective sample of 330 adolescents participated in the study. In the conceptual framework model, it was hypothesis that there were three determinants to the effectiveness of behavioral intention including attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. The target population for this study was Vietnamese adolescent from 15 to 35 years old in Ho Chi Minh City coming from three group of occupation including students, white-collar workers and bluecollar workers. Researcher applied quantitative approach as the major method to conduct the study with main statistic technique consisting factor analysis and multiple regression. Through the study, the difference among different demographics is also presented. Besides, Intention to avoid smoking was directly influenced by perceived benefit towards smoking, perceived harmfulness towards smoking, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. The finding from the study suggested that in order to reduce smoking in society, it is necessary to have the effects of parents, teacher and need more propaganda campaigns about the harmfulness of smoking. Keywords: TPB, Attitude towards behavior, Subjective norms, Perceived behavior control, Behavioral Intention.