Rates of cigarette use among young adults are the highest for any age group, including a surprisingly high rate of smoking among college students. Colleges and universities enroll over 14 million young adults and therefore are an ideal setting to encourage smoking cessation early in life. Unfortunately, there are currently no evidence-based cessation programs designed for college populations. The internet is a promising channel for delivering such interventions based upon high rates of internet use by college students. Our objective in this proposal is to perform a three-group randomized controlled trial to determine the efficacy of providing tailored cessation messages and peer support via the internet to college smokers. College smokers on 3 campuses (University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, University of Texas El Paso) who report any smoking in the prior 30-days will be identified and recruited via internet health screening (n=1680) and randomized to receive access to an online college life magazine that includes either: Tx1) untailored smoking cessation content,) individually tailored smoking cessation content, or ) individually tailored smoking cessation content plus peer email support.
Our specific aims are to determine if providing tailored cessation content is superior to untailored content (i.e. Tx2 >Tx1) and if providing peer email support is beneficial as an addition to tailored content (i.e. Tx3 >Tx2) in terms of promoting 6-month prolonged abstinence from tobacco use. Our own preliminary work supports this approach. In the RealU study we found that providing individually tailored smoking cessation messages and peer email support using an online magazine format increased 30-day abstinence rates compared to control. Collaboration with the University of Michigan's Center for Health Communications Research directed by Dr. Victor Strecher, an internationally recognized expert in the field of message tailoring, will further enhance the development of the intervention proposed here. At the completion of this project, it is our expectation that we will have identified an effective intervention package ready for dissemination via the internet to interested colleges and universities.
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