Health Measures at T5 Two measures related to health at T5 were u

Health Measures at T5 Two measures related to health at T5 were used. First, the number of different diseases or symptoms of diseases the participants had in the last fifteen years were reported. These diseases or symptoms consisted of diabetes, Nilotinib chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, heart disease or any other vascular problems, heart attack, stroke, coughing up phlegm or blood, asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema or chronic lung disease, trouble remembering things, difficulty thinking or concentrating, trouble learning new things, trouble sleeping, and osteoporosis. An indicator variable was created and assigned the value of one when the participant reported five or more diseases or symptoms of diseases and was assigned the value of zero otherwise.

Second, the participants reported their general health condition, which is a one item scale scored with six options: very poor (1), poor (2), fair (3), good (4), very good (5), and excellent (6). An indicator variable was created with the value of one for poor or very poor general health and the value of zero otherwise. Analysis We used the Mplus software (Muth��n & Muth��n, 2010) to identify the joint developmental trajectories of cigarette smoking and perceived self-control (N = 479). We treated the trajectory variables (i.e., cigarette smoking and self control at each point in time) as censored normal variables. The full-information maximum likelihood approach (Schafer & Graham, 2002) was used to treat missing data. We set each trajectory polynomial to be quadratic.

We used 400 random sets of starting values to assure finding the maximum of the likelihood function. We used the minimum Bayesian information criterion (BIC) to determine the number Cilengitide of trajectory groups (T). For presentation purpose, we assigned each participant to the trajectory group with the largest Bayesian posterior probability (BPP). The observed trajectories for a group were the averages of cigarette smoking and self-control at each point in time for the participants assigned to the group (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Joint trajectories of smoking and perceived self-control: Group HL (chronic cigarette smoking and low perceived self-control); Group LL (infrequent or non-cigarette smoking and low perceived self-control); Group MM (chronic moderate cigarette smoking … We conducted partial correlation analyses to examine the associations between cigarette smoking (mean score of smoking T2�CT4) and reporting five or more diseases or symptoms (T5) and poor or very poor health rating (T5), partialling out the history of perceived self-control (T2�CT4).

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