Problem/Objective: Funded by a five-year National Cancer Institute grant, the current study examines the feasibility of using an Internet-based curriculum to teach brief tobacco intervention skills to “health influencers,” (HIs) persons recruited from the community espressing an interest in helping other people quit tobacco.

Methods: The project's goals include (a) revising and adapting existing health intervention curricula to reach a broad range of HIs in community settings, (b) testing the efficacy of the revised curriculum to increase the reach of brief tobacco interventions in the community, and (c) examining whether brief intervention skills can be taught as effectively using Web-based training (WBT) as compared to an in-person (IP) workshop-based experience.

Results: The results support the assertion that when comparable instructional methods are used, a WBT curriculum can be as effective as an IP condition. However, as is the case in many on-line curricula, attrition of participants may diminish the apparent effectiveness of WBT, even when the comparability of instructional outcomes is demonstrated. The use of the web to teach brief tobacco intervention skills to a community-based audience randomly assigned to this medium, has produced interesting results regarding patterns of use, motivation to continue with on-line training and learner confidence in applying interpersonal skills learned on the web.

Conclusions: A discussion of these issues will be presented. The presentation concludes with a discussion of evaluation of web-based training, including attrition of subjects labeled “non-starters” and those labeled “non-completers.” It also discusses the problems associated with using an intent-to-treat model for outcome evaluation in web-based instruction.