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The broad long-term objective of our Pilot CARA aims to build a community and academic partnership to inform best practices for treating tobacco dependence among Californians seeking employment. By employment status, the job-seeking unemployed have the highest smoking prevalence for California adults. Research has not quantified tobacco’s negative effects on employability nor the motivations and barriers to quitting among the job-seeking unemployed. Our proposal seeks to understand and mitigate tobacco-related health and economic disparities in Californians experiencing financial instability. Study findings that quantify the negative effects of smoking on employment success will (1) inform integration of tobacco treatment services into employment agencies’ wellness practices and (2) motivate job-seeking smokers to utilize services and quit smoking.
The five specific aims of this Pilot CARA are to:
- Build a tobacco-focused collaborative of academic researchers, employment agencies, and the unemployed in the counties of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, and San Francisco;
- Through effective group process and community and academic participation, develop the TTEC mission statement, research questions and methods, and dissemination channels;
- Characterize the smoking behaviors, cessation motivations, and perceived barriers of 120 job-seeking unemployed smokers in California;
- Document the relationship between tobacco use and future employability by prospectively tracking 120 smokers’ and 120 nonsmokers’ employment success;
- Document tobacco-related hiring and zero-evidence worksite policies through an anonymous online survey of 500+ employers in Northern California.
Exploratory aims will examine the strength of the association between tobacco use and employability relative to other demographic and behavioral health factors and will examine the presence of tobacco-related hiring and worksite policies by employer industry type.
A relatively new area of inquiry, the proposed Pilot CARA is highly exploratory. Broadly stated, our study hypotheses are that:
(H1) Job-seeking unemployed smokers will be characterized by moderate-to-high nicotine dependence, a long history of tobacco use, and a desire to quit smoking;
(H2) Key factors motivating cessation will relate to financial, physical, and mental wellbeing;
(H3) Internal (e.g., withdrawal symptoms, low self-efficacy, co-occurring disorders) and external (e.g., poor treatment access, life stressors, tobacco exposure, low support) barriers to quitting will be identified;
(H4) Tobacco use will predict less success with securing employment, controlling for relevant covariates;
(H5) Employers will report greater use of implicit rather than explicit hiring practices related to tobacco use.
With a two-pronged approach and eye toward dissemination, we aim to inform both employment agencies’ effective treatment of tobacco dependence among the job-seeking unemployed and employer polices and practices to reduce tobacco use in the workplace. Key outcomes of this Pilot CARA award will be gaining the commitment and developing the infrastructure for a Full CARA proposal to extend the developed survey methods California statewide. |
