Development and psychometric properties of the Social Smoking Situations (S3) Scale: An enhanced measure of social exposure to smoking during adolescence

Common questions of exposure to smoking, such as number of parents, siblings, or friends who smoke, fail to capture the contexts in which the exposure occurs. This study developed the Social Smoking Situations (S3) Scale to more precisely measure contextual exposure to smoking during adolescence. Informed by the cue-reactivity literature and using informal focus groups, items of contextual exposure to smoking were generated for three categories of smokers: parents, siblings, and peers. Participants (N = 761; Mage = 15.6, SD = 1.3; 61.4% female) were recruited as part of the AdoQuest Study in Montreal, QC. Principal components analysis was used to identify the component structure of the parent, sibling, and peer versions of the S3 Scale. S3 scores were computed subsequently to test their association with smoking behavior and smoking expectancies. Further, S3 scores were compared with common questions (i.e., number of smokers) via univariate modeling to determine which would generate larger estimates of effect size when predicting smoking behavior and smoking expectancies. Overall, S3 scores generated larger estimates than common questions; this finding was consistent across the parent (ORavg: 2.59 vs. 1.36), sibling (ORavg: 3.44 vs. 1.59), and peer (ORavg: 3.89 vs. 1.38) versions. The S3 Scale is a new psychometrically sound instrument that may provide a more robust measurement of social exposure to smoking during adolescence. Importantly, it has the potential to strengthen prevention programming and intervention efforts aimed at adolescents, as it could depict a more precise portrait of the individual and contextual sources of social exposure to smoking.