The timing of life events and stopping smoking: how do English men and women behave?

Maria Herica La Valle, University of Southampton
Agnese Vitali, University of Southampton

This paper focuses on health behaviours as a cause of health outcomes in late life, and investigates the factors influencing them. In particular, it aims at verifying and identifying the life events that may lead or prevent people to stop smoking and at exploring the relationship between the timing of these life events and the decision to stop smoking at a certain point of the life course. The expectation is that a particular life event, such as cohabitation, marriage, childbearing, abortion, interruption of work, job and residential mobility, kinship ties’ rupture, affects the decision to stop smoking differently on the basis of the time when it happens. By drawing data from the third wave of English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), which provides retrospective information on individual health, employment and family and fertility histories, the purpose is to conduct a cohort analysis by a gender perspective. The paper will use Survival Analysis approach (with constant time), in order to analyse the risk to stop smoking at a certain age, considering specific life course events that are thought of potentially having an effect on it depending on the age when men and women experience them.