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.