Daily and lifecourse contexts of smoking

Smoking remains a key topic of research and debate within the field of health research in the social sciences. This article seeks to add the dimension of the smokers' and ex-smokers' perspectives to the debate in order to ground the importance of smoking in people's everyday lives. Data are drawn from 54 semi-structured interviews with smokers and ex-smokers involved in a study of their experiences and understandings of the place of smoking in their daily and long-term biographies. The rich accounts given by the respondents are interpreted through Van Gennep's (1960) notions of rituals and rites of passage. By examining the contexts within which the practice of smoking and the rite of giving up occur, a sense of the effort required to break 'the habit' is given, which adds much to more physiologically-based explanations of the difficulties of smoking cessation.