Facebook group helps habit go up in smoke, study finds
Facebook may be able to help you quit smoking, according to a UCSF study slated for release Thursday.
The study used the world’s most popular social media site to recruit 500 smokers ages 18 to 25. It exposed them to messages about quitting and counseling about quitting, all through Facebook.
The upshot: The Facebook users were 2½ times more likely to stop smoking than young adults who were exposed to more traditional online quitting programs — in this case, the National Cancer Institute’s smokefree.gov website.
The study, conducted between 2014 and 2016, is one of the first by a U.S. research institution to examine whether social media can help young adult smokers to quit. A 2016 Canadian study had similar findings — that young adult smokers who were targeted by a social media campaign were more likely to stop than those who
used a telephone hotline.
The UCSF study’s participants joined a private Facebook group in which they could communicate with a trained counselor through a weekly live counseling session, similar to a Reddit-style question-and-answer exchange. Researchers also created daily posts tailored to the participants’ level of interest in quitting — some expressed a desire to quit
immediately, some indicated they wished to quit in the next six months, and others had no plans to quit. The study looked at whether people stopped smoking after three months, six months and 12 months of the Facebook intervention.
Someone who didn’t smoke seven consecutive days was considered to have successfully abstained. For verification, participants took a saliva
Participants joined a private Facebook group and communicated with a trained counselor.
test that detects cotinine, an indicator of nicotine exposure.
Researchers were particularly interested in targeting young adults because that age group does not use traditional quitting programs as often as older adults, even though the programs are accessible online and through texting services.
“In our intervention, people were much more engaged and active,” said Danielle Ramo, the study’s lead author and director of the research on addiction and digital interventions lab at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry.
Ramo, an associate professor of psychiatry, is now looking into using Instagram to recruit participants for clinical trials to test the effectiveness of social media interventions for tobacco and alcohol for young adults and LGBT adults.