Cessation efforts were assessed at follow-up. A cessation attempt was defined as an intentional attempt to quit smoking lasting at least 24 hr. Of the original 109 participants, 99 (91%) completed 6-month follow-up assessments; 44 reported a cessation attempt. Participants who were abstinent at the follow-up interview and had quit scientific study within the prior 2 weeks were excluded from analyses using abstinence duration because the ultimate outcome of their cessation effort could not be determined. For the remaining 42 participants, length of abstinence ranged from 2 to 180 days, with a median of 29.5. These 42 participants did not differ from other participants on demographics, baseline smoking, or temptation-coping score. Temptation coping was assessed with the Smoking Temptation Coping Questionnaire (STCQ).

The STCQ was adapted from the Temptation Coping Questionnaire (TCQ; Myers, Stice, & Wagner, 1999; Myers & Wagner, 1995), a self-report measure of youth coping with temptations in a high-risk situation for alcohol or other drug use. As with the original TCQ, the STCQ consists of description of a hypothetical temptation situation (��It’s after school. You see some friends across the street from school, hanging out, talking and smoking cigarettes. You walk over to join the group, and someone offers you a cigarette��), appraisal questions, and coping items. The appraisal questions assess perceived difficulty, importance, and self-efficacy of abstaining in the situation, each rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale.

Participants are presented with 11 coping items and asked to endorse the likelihood of using each strategy in the hypothetical situation. Response options range from ��definitely would not use�� to ��definitely would use�� on a 5-point scale. The content of the STCQ items are equivalent to those on the TCQ, with wording changed to refer to cigarette smoking. Results Exploratory factor analysis Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the STCQ items identified three eigenvalues greater than 1 and generated a scree plot that indicated a stronger first factor (eigenvalue = 3.84; 34.9% of the common variance) and a natural break at the first factor. EFAs were run and items retained if they had a loading of greater than .40 on their primary factor and loadings of .30 or less on a second factor and if they were consistent with factor content (Floyd & Widaman, 1995).

Three iterations of this process resulted in a single-factor solution comprising six items (Table 2). Table 2. Exploratory factor analysis item loadings of the six-item STCQ measure Validation analyses Past-month total cigarettes and abstinence duration were log transformed to correct skewness prior to analyses, resulting in acceptable distributions for AV-951 each variable. The STCQ scale score, computed as a sum of items, was related positively with efficacy for abstaining (r = .32, p = .