Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Antonio Cepeda-Benito
Second Advisor
Kathy Fox
Abstract
The ongoing tobacco epidemic has wrought devastation on the health and prosperity of United States citizens for decades. Though tobacco denormalization efforts successfully reduced population-level smoking rates in recent decades, these declines are not uniform across some minoritized segments of the population. Tobacco denormalization strategies themselves often emulate facets of stigmatization, and thus unsurprisingly are associated with increases in perceived and perpetrated smoker stigma. The consequences of this stigma are largely unknown, and the available research relies on scales of dubious theoretical and psychometric merit, or on purely qualitative methods with small sample sizes. This dissertation presents a series of studies introducing quantitative measures of both implicit and explicit stigma. The first two studies validate self-report measures of public stigma and self-stigma toward smokers in large samples. Both measures demonstrated excellent fit through confirmatory factor analysis and expected relationships with hypothetically related constructs. The second two studies introduced and validated a novel web-based task measuring implicit stigma, and then applied that task to measuring implicit smoker stigma. The results indicated an overall pro-nonsmoker bias and some group differences based on smoking status and endorsement of explicit smoker stigma. Overall, the four studies substantively advance the field and together they constitute the most comprehensive investigation of smoking stigma to date.
Language
en
Number of Pages
135 p.
Recommended Citation
Geist, Thomas, "Advancing Quantitative Research Of Smoker Stigmatization" (2025). Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 1888.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1888