‘It’s one of those “It’ll never happen to me” things’: young women’s constructions of smoking and risk

Abstract

In this article, we examine how young women make sense of the risks associated with smoking cigarettes. We recruited young women smokers and ex-smokers living in Australia in 2014 and 2015 to participate in semi-structured interviews and a participant-produced photography activity on young women’s experiences of smoking and smoking-related risk. We analysed the data using discourse analysis to examine how young women positioned themselves in relation to smoking-related risk, and how this was shaped by discourses of health, risk and femininity. We identified four dominant interpretative repertoires: ‘the risks of smoking are self-evident’, ‘it’s not going to happen to me’, ‘smoking as a lesser evil’ and ‘smoking to cope with stress and emotion’. Through our analysis, we found that by drawing on these repertoires, participants were able to position the risks of smoking as both acceptable and unacceptable. Participants also made use of several of these repertoires to position anti-smoking messages as ineffective. We place these findings in the context of broader health and risk discourses surrounding young women’s use of smoking to reinforce and subvert representations of ‘respectable’ femininity. We identify ways in which public health approaches could and should be developed to recognise the complexity and contradiction inherent in young women’s lay accounts of smoking-related risk and situate smoking risks in the context of young women’s everyday lives.

Keywords:

• smoking
• risk
• risk perception
• discourse analysis
• photography
• young women

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emilee Gilbert for participating in the design of the study, Christine Metusela for help with the data collection and analysis phases of the study and Jasmine Sproule for help with data collection. We would also like to thank Alexandra Hawkey for her feedback on the manuscript. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under a Discovery Project Grant DP130100723: ‘Young Women’s Experiences of Cigarette Smoking: A Qualitative Examination of the Intersection of Gender, Class, Cultural, and Sexual Identity’. Janette Perz and Jane Ussher were chief investigators, and Zoi Triandafilidis received a Discovery Postgraduate Research Scholarship as part of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under a Discovery Project Grant [DP130100723]: ‘Young Women’s Experiences of Cigarette Smoking: A Qualitative Examination of the Intersection of Gender, Class, Cultural, and Sexual Identity’.