Study reveals the most effective anti-vaping messages for teens

Efficient anti-vaping commercials geared to teenagers have the best influence after they emphasize the hostile penalties and harms of vaping e-cigarettes, use damaging imagery, and keep away from memes, hashtags and different “teen-centric” communication types, in keeping with a first-of-its-kind research by researchers at UNC Lineberger Complete Most cancers Heart.

The researchers additionally discovered that sure messaging content material presently getting used, particularly imagery associated to sweet and taste, will increase the enchantment of vaping and must be averted when designing prevention messages.

The findings appeared Could 9, 2022, within the journal Tobacco Management.

“E-cigarettes and vaping have change into a significant public well being concern, with nicotine habit and different dangerous outcomes looming massive for youth,” mentioned UNC Lineberger’s Seth M. Noar, Ph.D., the paper’s corresponding writer and professor within the UNC Hussman Faculty of Journalism and Media, the place he directs the Speaking for Well being Affect Lab. “The share of teenagers vaping elevated from about 5% in 2011 to over 25% in 2019,” Noar mentioned. “That’s an alarming pattern, making an understanding of efficient vaping prevention messages particularly pressing.”

For the reason that introduction of e-cigarettes, quite a few state and native well being departments have created their very own anti-vaping messaging geared to teenagers, as have nationwide well being organizations such because the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration and Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention.

The web research requested 1,501 teenagers to price seven randomly chosen vaping prevention advertisements from a pool of greater than 200 advertisements. Vaping prevention advertisements that clearly communicated the well being harms of vaping, or in contrast vaping to cigarette smoking, have been comparatively simpler. Impartial or much less personally related content material, reminiscent of referencing the environmental influence of vaping or the focusing on of youth by the tobacco business, was much less impactful.

“Though we anticipated that vaping prevention advertisements with impartial or nice imagery wouldn’t be as efficient, we have been alarmed to search out that flavor-related messages truly heightened the attractiveness of vaping,” mentioned first writer Marcella H. Boynton, Ph.D., an assistant professor within the UNC Division of Common Medication and Medical Epidemiology and statistician on the North Carolina Translational and Medical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute.

“On reflection, it stands to purpose that by reminding teenagers about pleasurable features of e-cigarettes, even throughout the context of a prevention advert, we run the chance of doing hurt. Notably, we discovered that flavor-related prevention advert content material was related to vaping enchantment amongst each customers and non-users of e-cigarettes, which is an efficient reminder of how a lot sweet and fruit flavors in e-cigarettes have pushed the youth vaping epidemic.”

In future research, the researchers hope to analyze the results of different sorts of anti-vaping advertisements on a variety of audiences. In addition they are creating a sequence of messages and a companion web site to check the flexibility of a textual content message-driven intervention to cut back youth vaping. In that regard, Noar notes, “We’ve been creating our personal evidence-based messages based mostly on the newest science concerning the harms of vaping. Our messaging method has been vastly influenced by the insights generated by this research.”

The research utilized UNC’s Vaping Prevention Useful resource, a web site designed to offer practitioners, researchers and communities with vaping prevention media content material from all over the world, in addition to methods and sources for youth vaping prevention. It’s the largest repository of free, open-access vaping prevention supplies, all accessible for obtain at https://vapingprevention.org/.

Along with Noar and Boynton, different authors at UNC are Nora Sanzo, MPH, Whitney Brothers, MA, Alex Kresovich, MA, and Paschal Sheeran, Ph.D.; Erin L. Sutfin, Ph.D., is at Wake Forest Faculty of Medication, Winston-Salem, NC.