Another area of inquiry is to examine how motivational interviewing works, and we have two ongoing studies in this area.

In the one funded by NIAAA (R01AA015930), nicknamed MOA, we are assessing what therapists and patients did in CHOICES, and how these actions related to outcomes.  We are also testing the utility of our coding system to detect distinctions between MI and other evidence based psychotherapies and treatments for addiction.

The second was a pilot project funded by UVA’s NCI cancer center grant (P30 CA44579), a Goodwin grant, to evaluate practice behaviors of primary care practitioners as they conduct visits with their smoking patients.  In that project, we provided training in Motivational Interviewing and evaluated practitioner behavior before and after the training.  This study is showing that we can train physicians and nurse practitioners to use MI techniques with smoking patients, and that patients respond by reducing their smoking!