Autobiographical narratives can be used with confidence to collect information about ex-smokers' reasons for quitting smoking.

Although autobiographical narratives (ABNs) provide rich descriptions of how people change addictive behaviors, psychometric evaluations of such reports are rare. 27 ex-smokers who had quit for 1 to 5 years were interviewed twice about why they quit. Participants' ABN reasons for why they quit smoking were compared with their answers on the Reasons For Quitting (RFQ) scale and found to be similar. Ex-smokers' ABNs are reliably reported for number and types of reasons given for quitting. Reasons ex-smokers gave in their ABNs were similar to their RFQ subscale answers. ABNs, a qualitative measure of quitting smoking, captured more information about how people quit smoking than quantitative scales.