Mediators of a successful web‐based smokeless tobacco cessation program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: To examine self-efficacy and program exposure as possible mediators observed treatment effects for a web-based tobacco cessation intervention. DESIGN: The ChewFree trial used a two-arm design to compare tobacco abstinence at both the 3- and 6-month follow-up for participants randomized to either an enhanced intervention condition or a basic information-only control condition. SETTING: Internet in US and Canada. PARTICIPANTS: Our secondary analyses focused upon 402 participants who visited the web-based program at least once, whose baseline self-efficacy rating showed room for improvement, who reported that they were still using tobacco at the 6-week assessment, and for whom both 3- and 6-month follow-up data were available. INTERVENTION: An enhanced web-based behavioral smokeless tobacco cessation intervention delivered program content using text, interactive activities, testimonial videos and an ask-an-expert forum and a peer forum. The basic control condition delivered tobacco cessation content using static text only. MEASUREMENTS: Change in self-efficacy and program exposure from baseline to 6 weeks were tested as simple and multiple mediators on the effect of treatment condition on point-prevalence tobacco abstinence measured at 3- and 6-month follow-up. FINDINGS: While both participant self-efficacy and program exposure satisfied the requirements for simple mediation, only self-efficacy emerged as a mediator when we used the more robust test of multiple mediation. CONCLUSIONS: Results confirm the importance of self-efficacy change as a probable underlying mechanism in a successful web-based behavioral intervention. While program exposure was found to be a simple mediator of tobacco abstinence, it failed to emerge as a mediator when tested with self-efficacy change in a multiple mediator test suggesting that self-efficacy and program exposure share a complex, possibly reciprocal relationship with the tobacco abstinence outcome. Our results underscore the utility of searching for mediators in research on web-based interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".