Non-compliance with university tobacco-free policies: A qualitative exploration

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Though university smoke-free and tobacco-free campus policies have been proliferating across the US, compliance and enforcement remain challenges. This study examined perceptions and behaviors of employees and students who used tobacco products on tobacco-free campuses, to better understand policy noncompliance. METHODS Students (n=56) and employees (n=20) from two tobacco-free 4-year public universities in Southern California who self-reported using tobacco products on campus participated in focus groups, stratified by university and student or employee (faculty and staff) status, to discuss attitudes toward campus tobacco policies and on-campus smoking. Focus group discussions were transcribed and analyzed after structured coding and subcoding. RESULTS Participants were generally aware that smoking and vaping were not allowed on campus, though few could correctly identify their campus as tobacco-free. Attitudes toward the policy varied by subgroup and by campus, with students and employees at different universities expressing varying levels of support. Noncompliance was a unique interaction of individual, institutional, and interpersonal factors including a desire to smoke or vape to reduce stress, lack of formal enforcement or penalty for violating the policy, and efforts to smoke or vape in ways that reduce harm to others as a way of rationalizing non-compliance. CONCLUSIONS Attitudes toward university tobacco-free policies are campus-and constituency-specific, with similarities in individual, institutional, and interpersonal factors underlying non-compliance. Interventions to increase compliance should address individual, institutional, and interpersonal influences on non-compliance through efforts tailored to specific campus constituencies based on their particular knowledge and attitudes towards tobacco-free policies.

Overview of the Implementation of the No Smoking Area (KTR) Policy in the Indonesian Campus Environment: Literature Review

“…According to the results of the article, smoking behavior occurs due to factors of smoking habits from the age of children, other family members of smokers, the influence of scattered cigarette advertisements and "habituation" factors in society that consider smoking as normal behavior, making smokers feel that they have not done wrong to smoke anywhere. Differences also exist in studies at overseas campuses (Sendall et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2022) that include vape smoking (e-cigarettes) as part of the KTR KTR violations encountered in the literature are "the discovery of people who smoke" in the KTR area and the existence of convenience stores that sell cigarettes. The action given to violators, only in the form of a reprimand to put out cigarettes.…”