The reliability and validity of self-reported puffing behavior: Evidence from a cross-national study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-reported puffing behavior has considerable potential as an indicator of smoking intensity, particularly in survey research evaluating population-based changes in smoking patterns. However, little is known about the reliability and validity of self-reported puffing behavior. This study compared smokers' perceptions of their puffing behavior with measures of both machine-determined puffing behavior and nicotine uptake to assess the utility of self-report. We assessed self-reported puffing behavior as well as demographic and smoking characteristics of 118 smokers from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At two visits, participants were asked to provide a saliva sample and to smoke a cigarette through a portable smoking topography device, the CReSSmicro, to measure puffing behavior. Saliva samples were assayed for cotinine, a measure of nicotine uptake, to provide estimates of smoke exposure. Intraclass coefficients for all measures of self-reported general puffing behavior were above .6, indicating that self-reported measures had fair-to-good test-retest reliability. Self-report, in particular of interpuff interval and number of cigarette puffs, was correlated only moderately with machine-determined puffing measures (.2<r<.4), and no self-report measure related to smoke exposure as measured by cotinine. Self-reported measures of puffing behavior appear to be fairly reliable but are correlated only weakly with objective measures of smoking topography. Results suggest that smokers have a better perception of the time spent between puffs and of the number of puffs taken than of the intensity and depth of each puff or their actual smoke exposure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".