Grant Number:	5R03CA083352-02 Interpret this number
Primary Investigator:	Klecan, Debra
Organization:	University Of New Mexico
Project Title:	Tobacco Cessation Project for Native American Youth
Fiscal Year:	2000

Smoking prevalence among adolescents is rising despite aggressive tobacco control efforts. Students who smoke are motivated and interested in quitting, but few cessation programs show any long-term effectiveness. One of the recent advances in cessation counseling for adults is computer- assisted systems to tailor messages to gender, smoking history, and stage of changes. However, these systems have not taken full advantage of the latest technology and have not been developed or evaluated for Native American youth. The continued sacredness of tobacco and ceremonial use of tobacco in most Southwestern tribes create a unique situation when addressing the rise of abuse of commercial tobacco products among American Indian youth. The overall goal of the proposed project is to adapt, expand, and evaluate an effective computer-interactive cessation system to facilitate tobacco cessation among diverse Native American youth populations in the Southwest. This proposal is a two-year randomized controlled school-based intervention to test individualized peer counseling computer-aided cessation approaches with American Indian male and female smokers in grades 9-12. The proposed intervention will adapt and test the CD-ROM, CHATT (Computers Helping Adolescents Talk Tobacco) that was developed in a study funded by the American Cancer Society. CHATT is a computer system that features detailed smoking history, individual tailored feedback, and counseling vignettes based on the Transtheoretical Model. Using the Motivational Interviewing model, the peer counseling will facilitate the student's cessation with the computer providing guidelines for discussion of tobacco use and strategies for quitting. The current proposal will be a collaboration between the University of New Mexico's Epidemiology and Cancer Control Program, Indian Health Service's (Headquarters West Cancer Control Program, and the Gallup McKinley County School District, located in western New Mexico, which includes youth from the Navajo Nation and surrounding tribes. The first six months of year one of the proposal will be devoted to the adaptation and "beta-testing" of CHATT. During the remainder of Year One and during Year Two we will conduct a randomized trial on the effectiveness of the CHATT multimedia program on cessation rates, using a pretest- posttest control group design.





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