Rajani Shankar Sadasivam*, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, United States Rebecca Kinney, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, United States Sowmya R Rao, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, United States Erik M Volz, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, United States Thomas K Houston*, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Web 2.0 approaches for behaviour change, public health and biosurveillance Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2012-09-16

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To reach the Healthy People objectives of reducing smoking prevalence in the United States, cessation methods must be readily available. Easily disseminated interventions such as Quitlines and smoking cessation websites can potentially reach a greater number of smokers. Yet, these interventions are under-utilized.

Outside healthcare, we see several examples of products going “viral” as friends refer their friends to these products. For e.g., Farmville, a social networking game launched on Facebook, attracted over 75 million active users within a year of its launch exclusively through friend referrals.

In behavioral sciences, the idea of peer to peer spread is called chain referrals. Leveraging users’ natural tendencies for chain referrals online to support public health interventions has not been extensively studied. Proactive chain referrals work better than passive approaches. Thus, in Share2Quit, we propose to build and test a proactive toolset of chain-referral tools to facilitate smokers to recruit other smokers to participate in a web-assisted tobacco intervention. Our proactive toolset will include downloadable marketing materials, an email referral mechanism, and social networking “widgets” (e.g, Facebook widget) for marketing and referring current smokers. These tools will be refined using formative interviews and think aloud usability testing with smokers.

To maximize the effectiveness of chain referrals, we will implement best practices of Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS), a chain referral approach designed to remove inherent biases in chain referrals. The chain referral process will be initiated by the recruitment of seeds from among the smoker actively engaged in Decide2Quit. These seeds will be trained to recruit smokers using Share2Quit’s chain referral tools. Newly recruited smokers will in turn be trained to refer other smokers.

We will evaluate predictions of RDS recruitment success. Our measures will include Social Connectedness, Age, Race, Ethnicity, and Tool Usage.

Share2Quit will provide important data to enhance our understanding of online chain referrals to increase access to health intervention services. In the Medicine 2.0 conference, we will present our Share2Quit concept and preliminary results on the development and evaluation of the Share2Quit chain referral tools. Share2Quit is supported by NIH grant NCI R21CA158968.