Mobile Ecological Momentary Assessment-based Peer Counselling for Youth Smokers: a Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial

Most smokers begin smoking during adolescence and early adulthood, a crucial period to prevent initiation and continuation of smoking. However, many proven smoking cessation interventions for adult smokers were not found effective in youth smokers, which may be partly explained by the vast differences in the pattern of tobacco use and determinants of quitting between adult and youth smokers. This calls for more research on novel intervention models to help young smokers quit.

The HKU Youth Quitline provides free smoking cessation support for smokers aged below 25 years since August 2005 in Hong Kong. The service provides multisession peer-led telephone counselling with an individualised quit plan devised for each young smoker according to their responses. Since the counselling model depends on the information retrospectively recalled by the smokers, it may be prone to recall and social desirability biases and fail to capture the variability of youth smoking patterns and momentary changes in personal (e.g., mood) and situational (e.g., peer smoking) antecedents of smoking episodes.

Recent advances in mobile technologies have enabled the use of more advanced and robust data collection approaches like ecological momentary assessment (EMA), which may benefit the counselling model by providing more ecologically valid data than traditional surveys. Previous studies have demonstrated the feasibility of using EMA to collect data on psychosocial processes and smoking behaviours in adolescent smokers. Therefore, we propose to develop and test a mobile EMA-based counselling intervention for youth smokers by conducting a pilot RCT.