The RealU: An Online Smoking Prevention and Cessation Intervention for College Students

Authors: Emily Lein (Rhetoric MS Candidate), Larry An, MD (PI: Division General Medicine), Dana Farley (Boynton Health Service), Glenn Hirsch, PhD (University Counseling and Consulting Services), Cheryl Perry, PhD, Harry Lando, PhD, Deb Hennrikus, PhD (School Public Health)

The RealU is a two group-randomized online smoking prevention and cessation intervention designed for and by University of Minnesota college students. This 20-week project incorporated weekly online check-ins and peer support via e-mail. Participants enrolled online (n approx 250 per group) and were invited to visit each week via e-mail and complete a form describing several current health and lifestyle habits (smoking, drinking, exercise, diet, stress level, study habits, and social life). They also communicated with a peer support person via e-mail.

Recruitment and retention of participants to on-line interventions is an important challenge for new media research. We will describe our recruitment procedures that consisted of on-line health screening of the student population and follow-up invitation to current smokers to participate in an on-line health promotion project. Using these procedures, the RealU was able to enroll over 500 subjects in less than 1 week.

We will also describe strategies for increasing retention and encouraging return visits to our intervention site. In a pilot test of a beta version of this site we experienced sharp declines in weekly participation (<20% by week 4). We will describe revision of the site based upon additional usability testing (UM Dept Rhetoric) that resulted in a dramatic increase in weekly visits rates. Weekly participation rates for the intervention site have ranged from 89% to 98% for the past 20 weeks.

Preliminary results of differences in smoking and related health behaviors (stress, exercise, alcohol use) between the intervention and control groups will be available by the conference date.

HOME