Is Web-Based Education Effective in Reducing Belief Toward Drug Abuse Among College Students?

Addiction is considered a basic structural problem in modern society, and seems to reach an epidemic scale in the last decades. Choosing a method to fulfill the intervention is an important issue to conduct educational interventions to prevent addictive behaviors. In this regard, web-based education has been widely used to introduce preventive programs to risky behaviors during recent years. The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of web-based education intervention to decrease positive beliefs encouraging drug abuse among male medical college students. This was a prospective-retrospective intervention study that was conducted among 75 male students in Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, Kermanshah, Iran, during 2014. t-test was used for the statistical analysis. Our findings indicated that the belief toward drug abuse was significantly reduced after education (P = 0.003). In addition, compared pre and post-intervention scores on survey items showed a significant reduction in enjoyment, improve energy, attraction, higher strength, and higher self-esteem items after education (P < 0.05), whereas there was no significant reduction in excitement, relaxation, improved mental ability and forgetting problems after education (P > 0.05). Our findings showed that designing and implementing web-based educational intervention could be effective to reduce the positive beliefs toward drug abuse among college students.