Nienke Boderie

Chapter 12 398 are in, is low hanging fruit, given the high level of public support. However, when exploring public support, social desirability bias is a risk, whereby people may be overstating the level of support.16 With representative samples and survey weights, studies have minimalised this bias. Another risk lies within the framing of the smoke-free places. While people may favour a change towards smoke-free zones in general, they may be less so if these changes affect their own day-today life. If asked about smoke-free policies in general or in their close proximity, it could be that the former is viewed more positively than the latter. However, comparing the support for a local smoke-free zone surrounding a hospital (65 to 89% positive or very positive) to smoke-free hospitals in the Netherlands in general (85%) we see little to no indication of such an effect. Finally, it is known that support often increases following implementation, but less is known about support following implementation of many policies at once. It could be that support is high for individual measures but may change if many smoke-free places were implemented at once. Chapter 5 on support for novel smoke-free policies does not yet fully answer that question. Although we studied support in context of the National Prevention Agreement, in which many strategies were proposed at the same time, these measures were implemented in phases. At the same time, many of the goals were recommendations instead of formal policies. Presenting a set of policies as a tobacco endgame strategy might be beneficial to remind the public of the overarching goal of the policies to implement, such as reaching a smoke-free generation.17 General insights Responsibility In an ideal world, our research would contribute to a smoke-free generation by creating a world in which external stressors and behavioural irrationalities are no longer interfering with the desired behavioural goal. This is no doubt an important and desirable goal. However, it is important to keep in mind that these strategies might create the impression of individual responsibility. If there are no stressors and we would know how to deal with irrational behaviour, smoking might be seen as a choice. Here lays an important role for policy makers. Namely, there should be a focus on avoiding the introduction of new products and regulate the visibility and availability of nicotine products. As long as the tobacco industry keeps targeting children, developing new and more addictive products and circumvent legislation, tobacco usage cannot be seen as a free choice, at least

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