A better understanding of how male Jordanian psychiatric nurses become smokers and continue the habit mainly at work is necessary if smoking reduction and cessation programs are to help them better manage their smoking behaviours. Here we use a grounded theory approach to describe the factors that influenced the eight nurses in our sample to take up smoking. We use five categories derived from open coding to explain the initial stage in the smoking histories of the nurses. We situate our account of becoming a novice smoker within the contextualizing smoking behaviours over time theory we developed from our study. Finally, we relate the substantive findings we report here to the theoretical perspectives of symbolic interactionism and transtheoretical theory
