Kudos to Isaac Lipkus, professor, and his entire team for the submission of their subcontract proposal on the University of Georgia’s NIH R01 application entitled: "A Process-Based Investigation of Quitting Support Across Dual and Single-Smoker Couples." This proposal requests funding for a five-year period with a start date of April 1, 2022.

Specific Aims

Despite its significant health consequences, only half of smokers are motivated to try to quit in a given year and less than 10 percent are successful at quitting. The difficulty of getting motivated to and staying quit suggests broad social and motivational factors are necessary to understand to prevent relapse and improve rates of quit attempts and smoking cessation. One highly relevant social context is close-relationship partners who influence motivation and provide support for quitting. Because support is associated with greater quitting, it became a target of interest for intervention. However, interventions to increase support have largely been unsuccessful. These interventions have failed to consider that support is dynamically connected to multiple predictors that mutually influence each other over time. As such, changes to support (i.e., through intervention) may change other contextual factors that dampen or interfere with the intervention.

We propose foundational research to identify predictors of support—incorporating both enduring and dynamic predictors from support recipient and support provider. Drawing on interpersonal models of health behavior change, we evaluate candidate motivational and relationship factors likely to predict support. For instance, couple type—whether a smoker is partnered with another smoker (i.e., dual-smoker couple) or partnered with a non-smoker (i.e., single-smoker couple) influences the frequency and quality of support provision. Other candidate predictors (e.g., self-efficacy, relationship satisfaction) are likely to predict support and to vary over time. Because these variables will covary with support over time, their influence on support will change. More importantly, some variables are influenced by support provision (e.g., relationship satisfaction might increase with support). Because predictors of support are time-varying and also influence the provision of support, they confound the relationship between support and quitting. Past observational and experimental studies that have not accounted for these time-varying effects cannot estimate the potential causal link between support and quitting; instead an intense repeated measures (i.e., EMA) design is necessary:

• Aim 1: Characterize the antecedents of support provision.
• Aim 2: Account for time-varying dynamics in modeling the relationship between support and quitting outcomes.
• Aim 3: Characterize the relationship between support and quitting across couple type.

Lipkus will help devise the recruitment strategies to obtain couples for the study. This will include exploration of recruitment venues and crafting of ads. In addition, during year one, Lipkus will help with methodological details, such as which and how to assess theoretical concepts as well as be involved in discussions as to how these constructs theoretically should inform dyadic processes related to smoking cessation. He will be part of study conference calls that take place, help to evaluate study related materials, as appropriate, as well as attend an on-campus meeting, as needed, at the University of Georgia to discuss the study.