Expert System and Family Assisted Interventions for Chinese Smokers

Overview

In this study, we choose to specifically recruit Chinese, the largest ethnic group of the Asian and Pacific Islander community,2 as an initial step to increase our understanding of the role of family or supportive others in the process of smoking cessation among Asian Americans. We propose the following specific aims for the study: 1. Examine the effectiveness of proactive recruitment of Chinese smokers into a smoking cessation treatment program through their family or friends. 2. Test the efficacy of a family assisted intervention using the stages of change approach in promoting smoking cessation in the context of an expert system intervention. 3. Explore the role of supportive and non-supportive behaviors in relation to both short-term and long-term smoking cessation outcomes in the presence of the expert system intervention.

Limited empirical data are available on effective intervention approaches targeting Chinese American smokers. The overall goal of this study is to increase our understanding of the role of family or social support in the facilitation of the process of smoking cessation among Chinese smokers. We propose the following specific aims for the study: 1) Examine the effectiveness of proactive recruitment of Chinese smokers into a smoking cessation treatment program through their family or friends; 2) Test the efficacy of a family assisted intervention using the stages of change approach in promoting smoking cessation in the context of an expert system intervention; 3) Explore the role of supportive and non-supportive behaviors in relation to both short-term and long-term smoking cessation outcomes in the presence of the expert system intervention. This study will develop a family-assisted intervention in the form of a self-help booklet based on the Transtheoretical Model of Change (TTM) that will aim at teaching the supporters how to use the stages of change framework to apply different strategies that best match with smokers' readiness to quit smoking. This study will conduct focus groups and a pilot study to pre-test the study intervention and study procedures. The main randomized trial will recruit a total of 800 supporters and 800 smokers who are ethnic Chinese residing in the State of California. Each supporter-smoker pair will be randomly assigned to either 1) the expert system intervention only or 2) the expert system plus family-assisted intervention condition after baseline assessment by mail. All smokers in either condition will receive the expert system intervention. Half of the supporters will receive family-assisted intervention materials. All participants will be assessed at baseline, 3, 6, 12, and 18 months by mail or telephone. It is hypothesized that the expert system plus family-assisted intervention condition will yield significantly higher abstinence rates and higher portions to report quit attempts at follow-ups.