Evaluation Plan for the Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation (COMMIT)

The National Cancer Institute is sponsoring the Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation (COMMIT), a multi-center research project designed to test the value of a community-based effort to promote smoking cessation. The trial involves eleven matched pairs of communities with random assignment of one community per pair to the intervention or to the comparison condition. This article reviews the rationale and methodology of the COMMIT evaluation plan which is organized into four components: 1) outcome assessment, monitoring changes in community smoking patterns; 2) impact assessment, measuring the effect of the COMMIT intervention on mediating factors thought to be important in facilitating changes in community smoking behavior (e.g., social norms supporting nonsmoking); 3) process assessment, monitoring the quality and timeliness of intervention delivery; and 4) economic assessment, estimating the cost effectiveness of the intervention.