Date of Award
2002
Document Type
Practicum
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Programs for Higher Education
Advisor
Marian Gibney
Keywords
Arizona, Arizona Department of Health Services, WIC, brief interventions, client electronic record, clients, community nutrition workers, confidence levels, curriculum effectiveness, data collection, follow-up survey, health services, human subjects protection committees, hypothesis testing, lactating women, literature review, mean difference, null hypothesis, participant self-confidence, population and sample groups, postpartum women, posttest, pregnant women, pretest, research design, self-confidence, statistical significance, tobacco cessation, tobacco cessation interventions, tobacco cessation training curriculum, training participants, training program, tracking system, women, women infants and children program (WIC)
Abstract
Pregnant, postpartum and lactating women who are clients of the Arizona Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program have a 22% rate of tobacco use. This is 8% above the national average for this population. The purpose of this study was to measure changes in training curriculum participants' reported levels of self-confidence to deliver brief tobacco cessation interventions before and immediately after participation in the WIC tobacco cessation training curriculum. The research question investigated was: Does participation in a one day, six hour training curriculum designed to teach the skills necessary to deliver brief tobacco cessation interventions increase the participant' s self-confidence to deliver brief interventions immediately post curriculum training?
The procedures used to investigate the research question included identifying a research design, reviewing the literature, developing and testing an instrument to measure mean self-confidence scores pre- and post training, identifying population and sample groups, submitting documents to Human Subjects Protection Committees, distributing and collecting data collection instrument pre- and posttest, entering and analyzing data, plus reporting results and making recommendations.
A paired t-test of the hypothesis at the .05 level of significance was used to measure changes in mean scores pre- and post training of 91 Arizona WIC community nutrition workers. Results indicated that the null hypothesis was rejected. The mean difference of . 77 between the pretest and the posttest scores was statistically significant. This was interpreted as demonstrating that the Arizona WIC tobacco cessation training curriculum increased participant self-confidence levels.
The conclusions drawn from this study were that there was a statistically significant increase in self-confidence between the pretest-posttest mean scores of Arizona WIC community nutrition workers who participated in the tobacco cessation training (t(90) =11. 7, p< . 001) . In short, the training curriculum was an effective teaching intervention that improved confidence levels of participants in their ability to provide brief tobacco cessation interventions to their clients.
The following recommendations were made as a result of this study: (1) the Arizona Department of Health Services and Arizona WIC continue to measure the effectiveness of the curriculum training by tracking documented interventions using the WIC client electronic record; (2) a follow-up survey to training participants be implemented at 3, 6, and 12 months post training to assess sustained levels of self-confidence to deliver brief cessation interventions; and (3) a tracking system be implemented to measure cessation rates of clients as a result of brief interventions delivered by community nutrition workers.