Understanding Phenomenology of Smoking

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There has been a great increase in the number of deaths due to smoking. Headlines such as ‘’Second hand smoke kills 600,000 worldwide annually’’ (Falco, 2010) highlights that there’s a major problem. My question is, why are people still smoking? It should be a wake-up call for those who smoke but even with the hard facts presented, people still decide to smoke. As a psychology student, I was interested in exploring the phenomenology of smoking & wanted to address this matter further. To do this, I designed an interview schedule from which I have gained an individual’s emotion as well as perception towards smoking. Before I could do this I had to, myself, understand what an interview is & how I could professionally interview an individual considering ethics.

So what does it meant to interview? An interview consists of predetermined questions created to represent a chosen topic of interest (Jump, 2014). It involves an interviewer asking an individual questions based on this topic. It aims to explore the complexity of a topic which in this case would be smoking & investigate this more deeply (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor & Tindall, 1994). So with that said, I prepared ten questions related to smoking that was clear & easy to understand. I purposely chose to interview an individual smoker as myself I do not smoke therefore I was intrigued in a smokers perspective towards such habit. Creating the questions took a bit of time as there are many different topics when it comes to smoking. My main interests were exploring others opinions & views about smoking therefore I produced a set of questions relating to this. I conducted the interview in a quiet area & concluded that my interviewee had a sense of ambivalence. This is also know...

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