University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences
Publication Date
2013-09-24
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms | Health Communication | Health Information Technology | Health Services Administration | Health Services Research | Public Health Education and Promotion
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death in the United States. Effective Web-assisted tobacco interventions are often underutilized and require new and innovative engagement approaches. Web-based peer-driven chain referrals successfully used outside health care have the potential for increasing the reach of Internet interventions.
OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to describe the protocol for the development and testing of proactive Web-based chain-referral tools for increasing the access to Decide2Quit.org, a Web-assisted tobacco intervention system.
METHODS: We will build and refine proactive chain-referral tools, including email and Facebook referrals. In addition, we will implement respondent-driven sampling (RDS), a controlled chain-referral sampling technique designed to remove inherent biases in chain referrals and obtain a representative sample. We will begin our chain referrals with an initial recruitment of former and current smokers as seeds (initial participants) who will be trained to refer current smokers from their social network using the developed tools. In turn, these newly referred smokers will also be provided the tools to refer other smokers from their social networks. We will model predictors of referral success using sample weights from the RDS to estimate the success of the system in the targeted population.
RESULTS: This protocol describes the evaluation of proactive Web-based chain-referral tools, which can be used in tobacco interventions to increase the access to hard-to-reach populations, for promoting smoking cessation.
CONCLUSIONS: Share2Quit represents an innovative advancement by capitalizing on naturally occurring technology trends to recruit smokers to Web-assisted tobacco interventions.
Keywords
UMCCTS funding
Rights and Permissions
Copyright Rajani S Sadasivam, Erik M Volz, Rebecca L Kinney, Sowmya R Rao, Thomas K Houston. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (http://www.researchprotocols.org), 24.09.2013. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Research Protocols, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.researchprotocols.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
DOI of Published Version
10.2196/resprot.2786
Source
Sadasivam RS, Volz EM, Kinney RL, Rao SR, Houston TK. Share2Quit: Web-Based Peer-Driven Referrals for Smoking Cessation. JMIR Res Protoc. 2013 Sep 24;2(2):e37. doi: 10.2196/resprot.2786. Link to article on publisher's site
Related Resources
Journal/Book/Conference Title
JMIR research protocols
PubMed ID
24067329
Repository Citation
Sadasivam, Rajani S.; Volz, Erik M.; Kinney, Rebecca L.; Rao, Sowmya R.; and Houston, Thomas K., "Share2Quit: Web-Based Peer-Driven Referrals for Smoking Cessation" (2013). University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications. 350.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/350
Included in
Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Health Communication Commons, Health Information Technology Commons, Health Services Administration Commons, Health Services Research Commons, Public Health Education and Promotion Commons