Modification of a Smoking Motivation Questionnaire for Chinese Medical Students

Introduction: Smoking prevalence among the medical students is high in China. Therefore, understandingthe smoking motivations of medical students is crucial for smoking control, but currently there are no scalesquestionnaires customized for probing the smoking motivations of medical students. This aim of study wasto 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 in2012.The model fit and validity was assessed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the reliability was testedby single-item reliability, composite reliability, and item-total correlation.
Results: The prevalence of smokingwas 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. Theaverage 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.
Conclusion: Modified scales could be the preliminaryinstrument used in evaluating the smoking motivations of medical students. However, it should be further assessedusing other forms and methods of validity and reliability, additional motivations of smoking, and the survey ofother medical colleges in China.