| Summary: | The purpose of this essay has been to examine whether attitudes and behavior among Swedish people who takes snuff are dissonant or not and how their attitudes are affected by the media debate about the health risks snuff can cause. Furthermore, we were interested in finding out how different reference groups´ attitudes would influence the attitudes and the willingness of people to stop taking snuff and investigate how much control the people who take snuff think they have. To answer these questions we chose to ask primarily students at Stockholm University and Södertörns Högskola. The students were asked to fill out a questionnaire with 22 questions and the 100 responses we collected were worked up in a statistic program, SPSS, on the computer. The main models used for the essay and for the questionnaire were the Theory of Planned behavior and the Dissonance theory. Later, theories about rationality, risks and health were added to the essay. The results showed that the media debate does not influence the respondents to stop taking snuff and since the majority of the respondents had many friends that took snuff as well, the respondents didn’t feel any great dissonance which made their intention to stop even smaller. The answers to the question about the perceived behavior control tended to be quite contradictive. The respondents admitted to be addictive to nicotine but at the same time they said that they were able to quit taking snuff tomorrow if they wanted to. It seems like they underestimated the power of nicotine and overestimated their ability to quit. This is according to earlier research a very common thing among addicts. The results are not statistically significant since the number of respondents were very few. This essay may serve as a preliminary investigation for further research in this area.
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