Smoking leads to significant morbility and mortality throughout the world and many of those who smoke do not have the time to attend cessation programs. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
Richard Yi, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Health Education and Behavior in the University of Florida College of Health and Human Performance, has developed a smoking cessation program that incorporates insights from the areas of addiction, behavioral analysis, and social cognition. This program includes one in-person intervention session, followed by supplemental text-messaging to deliver program elements while participants live their regular lives. “We hope that this program accommodates smokers who want to quit but cannot attend programs that require more extensive in-person visits,” Dr. Yi says.
“We hope that this program accommodates smokers who want to quit but cannot attend programs that require more extensive in-person visits,” Dr. Yi says.
The smoking intervention program incorporates text messaging to help participants engage in perception-shifting strategies that help with quitting.
The study examines:
- Treatment characteristics and delivery, treatment integrity, dropout, and acceptability
- Smoking outcomes such as lapse, relapse and abstinence measures
- Changes in decision-making that result from a novel intervention
