This study aims at understanding the needs and concerns of the ethnic minority in Hong Kong, including their behavior, attitudes, and experiences related to smoking and smoking cessation. Specifically, how the level of smoking-related knowledge among them differ from the rest of the Hong Kong people, will be explored. In addition, whether Hong Kong smoking policy influenced the smoking pattern of them will be investigated.

Cigarette smoking is the most significant preventable cause of death and disease, causing 6 million deaths annually worldwide. Despite the fact that tobacco use in Hong Kong has been decreased from 23.3% in 1982 to 10.1% in 2017, the remaining 620 600 daily smokers[3] cannot be overlooked or undervalued.

Hong Kong is a predominantly Chinese society, but it has a sizeable South Asian ethnic minority (EM). According to the Census & Statistics Department, the number of ethnic minorities in Hong Kong increased significantly by 70.8% over the past 10 years. Nevertheless, few smoking and health promotion activities and smoking cessation services have been tailor-made for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. The barrier of supplying smoking cessation service to the ethnic minority group is that their smoking motivation, willingness to quit, obstacles of quit smoking, attitude towards Hong Kong tobacco law and smoking cessation services are not sure. This will be the first research exploring their knowledge, attitude and experience of cigarette smoking.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Only smokers with South Asian(Pakistani, Indian, or Nepalese)backgrounds
• Willing to participate
• aged 18 years or above
• able to speak English
• smoke at least one cigarette per day for the past 3 months

Exclusion Criteria:

• Domestic workers, asylum seekers, refugees, or illegal immigrants, individuals with other ethnic backgrounds, i.e., Africans
• Cannot speak English
• poor cognitive state or active psychotic symptoms, i.e. hallucination, illusion and delusion, noted in the medical records.

This study only focuses on ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities refer to persons who reported themselves being of non-Chinese ethnicity in the Population Census/By-census.

The relevant anonymized patient level data, full dataset, technical appendix, and statistical code are available on reasonable request. The approval from the Principal Investigator for the purpose of data use is required.

After the results of the project has been published.

Request could be sent to Principal Investigator (william3@hku.hk)