The Effectiveness of Web-Based Tailored Smoking Cessation Interventions on the Quitting Process (Project Quit): Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Project Quit was a randomized Web-based smoking cessation trial designed and conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan, where its primary outcome was the 7-day point prevalence. One drawback of such an outcome is that it only focuses on smoking behavior over a very short duration, rather than the quitting process over the entire study period.

Objective: The aim of this study was to consider the number of quit attempts during the 6-month study period as an alternative outcome, which would better reflect the quitting process. We aimed to find out whether tailored interventions (high vs low) are better in reducing the number of quit attempts for specific subgroups of smokers.

Methods: To identify interactions between intervention components of smoking cessation and individual smoker characteristics, we employed Poisson regression to analyze the number of quit attempts. This approach allowed us to construct data-driven, personalized interventions.

Results: A negative effect of the number of cigarettes smoked per day (P=.03) and a positive effect of education (P=.03) on the number of quit attempts were detected from the baseline covariates (n=792). Thus, for every 10 extra cigarettes smoked per day, there was a 5.84% decrease in the expected number of quit attempts. Highly educated participants had a 15.49% increase in their expected number of quit attempts compared with their low-educated counterparts. A negative interaction between intervention component story and smoker's education was also detected (P=.03), suggesting that a high-tailored story given to highly educated people results in 13.50% decrease in the number of quit attempts compared with a low-tailored story.

Conclusions: A highly individually tailored story is significantly more effective for smokers with a low level of education. This is consistent with prior findings from Project Quit based on the 7-day point prevalence.