Understanding Hard to Maintain Behaviour Change: A Dual Process Approach

Preface

I have had the great fortune to work for a small organisation that has had a huge impact, not only in tobacco control, but also in skin cancer prevention and other areas of cancer control. Under the inspired leadership of Nigel Gray and David Hill, the Cancer Council Victoria has been a leading light in the development of evidence-driven approaches to health promotion, in particular, the use of mass media and other mass communication tools to drive both environmental and personal changes to reduce behavioural risk factors for cancer. For more than 25 years, I have been contributing to this effort, researching aspects of tobacco control and sun protection, including evaluating the impacts of mass campaigns. For the past 15 years, my work has focussed on smoking. This continues to be satisfying because all the successful efforts to reduce smoking (however small) add healthy years to people's lives. When I started to work in this area, there was implicit confidence that we would quickly get on top of the problem. As smokers came to realise how bad it was and the social desirability of smoking was reduced, most smokers would quit and the problem would largely go away. However, in countries such as Australia, and increasingly elsewhere, the agenda for change that was adopted in the early days of tobacco control efforts has been pretty much completely implemented, but we are still only about half way to our goal.

As I have researched the issue, including being involved in some ...