“Look At Your Health”: Outcomes associated with a computer-assisted smoking cessation counseling intervention for community college students

Abstract

Community college students represent 44% of all students enrolled in U.S. higher education facilities. To our knowledge, no previous smoking cessation intervention has targeted community college students. Previous studies suggest that a motivational smoking cessation intervention could be successful for young adult smokers. Combining motivational interviewing sessions with personalized health feedback is likely to increase participants' motivation to quit and movement through the stages of change. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a smoking cessation program based on these premises. We designed a computer-assisted, counselor-delivered smoking cessation program that addresses personal health risks and readiness to change smoking behavior among community college students. A group-randomized, controlled trial was used to assess the intervention in a sample of 426 students (58.5% females; mean age, 22.8 ± 4.7 years) from 15 pair-matched campuses. At the 10-month follow-up assessment, the cotinine-validated smoking cessation rates were 16.6% in the experimental condition and 10.1% in the standard care condition (p = 0.07). Our results indicate that our computer-assisted intervention holds considerable promise in reducing smoking among community college students.

Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of computer and other electronic aids for smoking cessation: a systematic review and network meta-analysis.

“…Table 10 presents the characteristics of the included studies and their participants. In five studies 33,60,62,78,113 the interventions contained stand-alone computer programs only. Of the other two studies, one had telephone hotline, stop-smoking contest and self-help material as a co-intervention in each of the study arms, 33 whereas the other had brief advice by midwives and self-help manual as a co-intervention.…”

“…Length of follow-up ranged from 3 78 to 12 months. 60 Three studies 47,60,113 evaluated point prevalence abstinence. Two studies 33,78 did not define the abstinence.…”

“…A further three studies 34,36,73 conducted biochemical validation on a proportion of (usually randomly selected) participants and thus data for biochemically validated abstinence were not available for ITT analysis. The remaining four studies 60,80,101,113 were not included in meta-analyses, as their control groups were neither 'no intervention' nor 'non-electronic generic self-help material' .…”

“…Six studies (two aid to cessation studies, 33,113 four cessation induction studies 47,60,62,78 ) evaluated electronic interventions with stand-alone computer programs. The characteristics of the studies and participants, results of quality assessment and key findings are described below.…”

Changes in Executive Function Following Short-Term Tobacco Cessation Therapy in College Students

“…In addition, the tobacco cessation therapy in this study was highly individualized and variable in its nature and length. While these factors may limit the overall generalizability of these findings it can be argued that they are of high ecological validity or they represent the characteristics of individual's seeking and receiving tobacco cessation therapy within a university setting [46,52,53]. The extent to which these findings might generalize to non-college settings is unclear given the relationship between executive function and education level [38].…”