BMC Public Health 2006, 6:65 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/65 Table 1: Demographic and smoking characteristics of relapsed male smokers % of sample (N = 201) Characteristic Age < 30 years 30 – 39 years 40 – 49 years 50 years and older Education Completed elementary school Completed junior high & high school College and above Occupation Management Science/teaching Enterprise clerk Commercial clerk Other Individual Income (RMB) * < 1000 1000 – 1499 1500 – 1999 2000 – 2999 3000 – 4999 5000 - Age of smoking initiation < 20 years 20 – 29 years 30 years and older Cigarettes smoked per day < 10 cigarettes 10 – 19 cigarettes 20 or more cigarettes * 8.05 RMB ~ US$1. ful quitters [10]. Becoming a permanent ex-smoker depends on many factors including overcoming specific barriers to quitting that involve situational triggers and social cues to smoke that often lead to relapse [11-13]. In light of the predominance of male compared to female smokers in China, and the relatively low proportion of successful quitters evidenced in recent surveys, we felt the need to explore current attitudes of Chinese male smokers towards smoking cessation and their reasons for relapse through a representative sample of married men from a large city in China. This information begins to address to the lack of available information on factors related to ces- sation and relapse among Chinese smokers, and may serve as a basis for the development of future smoking ces- sation programs. Methods Using a research protocol that was approved by the Department of Social Medicine at the Zhejiang University, face-to-face interviews about smoking cessation behavior 14.9 35.8 31.8 17.5 5.5 70.6 23.9 16.9 12.9 44.3 20.9 5.0 41.9 34.9 8.0 5.6 3.5 6.1 43.2 30.9 25.9 35.3 46.8 17.9 were conducted by the first author (TY) and his staff of trained medical students in the homes of married men in Hangzhou City, capital of Zhejiang province in Eastern China. Male smokers were chosen because of the very high smoking rates among men over the age of 20 in China compared to women [10,14]. In addition, contact information for married men was readily accessible from city-identified households and we wished to identify the influence of family support for quitting. Households were identified by a multi-stage sampling procedure using a city-identified list of family house- holds. First, two city-defined residential districts were cho- sen with high density family households. Second, from each city-defined neighbourhood area within these dis- tricts, blocks of apartment buildings were randomly selected using "Jiedao" (a sub-district neighbourhood administration). Third, from these apartment buildings, household units were randomly sampled by proportional sampling methods, using the serial numbers for each apartment unit. Interviews were only sought from married men from these units who were current smokers ("Is there a smoker in this family who has smoked every day for the last 6 months?"); if none were present, no interview took place. In rare cases where there was more than one male married smoker in the household, a coin was flipped to determine who was to be interviewed. Trained research staff obtained an informed consent agreement from each smoker as a prerequisite for the interview. Interviews were conducted in private in a separate room and took only 30 minutes to complete. A reliability coefficient of 0.96 was obtained when a random 10% of the survey responses were checked by telephone. This process identified two samples: a) smokers who had never tried to quit, and b) smokers who had tried to quit and relapsed. While all these respondents completed face- to-face interviews, the attempted quitters provided addi- tional data related to situations and reasons for relapse. The interview survey [see Additional file 1] included items tapping the following themes: a)socio-demographics; b) current smoking status; c) smoking history; d) number of past quit attempts and length of abstinence; e) reasons for quitting; and f) situations that triggered relapse. From the responses we were able to rank reasons for quitting and relapse according to frequency. Results Responses were obtained from 95% of those households contacted. Of the 1,922 eligible participants identified and called, 56 individuals refused to be interviewed, thus yielding a final sample of 1,866 participants, of which 906 identified themselves as current smokers. Based upon these results, we calculated an estimated smoking preva- lence rate among our total sample of male smokers as Page 2 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)