ArticleSociology of health & illness2020
Explaining the social gradient in smoking and cessation: the peril and promise of social mobility.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Differences in the effectiveness of individual-level smoking cessation interventions by socioeconomic status.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Smoking and Quitting Behaviors by Different Indicators of Socioeconomic Position in England: A Population Study, 2014 to 2023.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2026Article
- E-cigarette use and smoking-related disparities in England: an observational study using small area estimation and nonparametric regression.Harm reduction journal · 2026Observational
- Patterns of disparity: age and socioeconomic differences in women's smoking and quitting outcomes in Great Britain.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- Associations between non-daily smoking and motivation to stop smoking: A population study in England 2021-2024.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Observational
- Associations of Close Social Connections With Smoking and Vaping: A Population Study in England.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2025Article
- Emotions and lung cancer screening: Prioritising a humanistic approach to care.Health & social care in the community · 2022Article
- Alcohol and Cigarette Use among Adolescents and Young Adults in Austria from 2004-2020: Patterns of Change and Associations with Socioeconomic Variables.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Transforming health systems to reduce health inequalities.Future healthcare journal · 2021Article
- Understanding adolescent health risk behaviour and socioeconomic position: A grounded theory study of UK young adults.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Smoking in high-income countries is now concentrated in poor communities whose relatively high smoking prevalence is explained by greater uptake but above all by lower quit rates. Whilst a number of barriers to smoking cessation have been identified, this is the first paper to situate cessation itself as a classed and cultural practice. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in a working-class community in the North of England between 2012 and 2015, I theorise smoking cessation as a symbolic practice in relation to the affective experience of class and social mobility. I show that ambivalence about upward mobility as separation and loss translated into ambivalence about smoking cessation. The reason for this was that the social gradient in smoking operated dynamically at the level of the individual life course, i.e. smoking cessation followed upward mobility. A serious health problem was an appropriate reason to quit but older women continued to smoke despite serious health problems. This was linked to historical gender roles leading to women placing a low priority on their own health as well as the intergenerational reproduction of smoking through close affective links with smoking parents.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.