A Pilot Study on Small Talk Intervention With MI in Assisting Smokers to Quit

Two RAs with at least 1 year of experience in counseling or related work will be hired to deliver the intervention. The same RA will deliver the eight-session intervention weekly via telephone to the same participant within 2 months. The intervention contains eight sessions which is similar to that in YQL. Interventions will be delivered via telephone because YQL also used the same delivery mode to successfully contact and assist a considerable number of smokers to quit . Based on our team's experience in YQL, each session will last from 30 minutes to 1 hour.

In the first to third sessions, the RA will engage in small talk with the participants for 30 minutes. The RA will talk to the participants on the proposed topics including the weather, activities the participant engaged in last week and at weekends, music, food, and other hobbies, all of which were recommended in previous literature as topics that interest most people and create curiosity and enjoyment rather than animosity. From the fourth session onwards, the RA will add 30 minutes of MI about smoking cessation after engaging in small talk. During MI delivery, the RA will use core MI skills, including open-ended questions, affirmation, reflective listening, and summary, elicit-provide-elicit, evoking change talk, and roll with resistance to move the participants from engaging (first process of MI) to planning (last process of MI), as in YQL and other smoking cessation projects that use MI. The RA will aim to go through the engaging process in the fourth session, focusing process in the fifth session, focusing and evoking in the sixth session, and evoking and planning in the seventh and eighth sessions. When transitioning from small talk to MI, some simple transitional sentences are suggested, such as: "We have been talking for quite a while since our contact at the first time. Actually, I am quite interested in understanding your smoking behaviors. Do you mind talking with me about that?" If the participants refuse, the RA will continue to deliver small talk and repeat asking in the next session if the participants can move to talk about smoking or not.