Study reveals the most effective anti-vaping messages for teens

Efficient anti-vaping ads geared to teenagers have the best affect once they emphasize the adversarial penalties and harms of vaping e-cigarettes, use adverse imagery, and keep away from memes, hashtags and different “teen-centric” communication kinds, based on a first-of-its-kind examine by researchers at UNC Lineberger Complete Most cancers Middle.

The researchers additionally discovered that sure messaging content material presently getting used, particularly imagery associated to sweet and taste, will increase the attraction 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 serious public well being concern, with nicotine habit and different dangerous outcomes looming giant for youth,” stated UNC Lineberger’s Seth M. Noar, Ph.D., the paper’s corresponding writer and professor within the UNC Hussman College of Journalism and Media, the place he directs the Speaking for Well being Influence Lab. “The proportion of teenagers vaping elevated from about 5% in 2011 to over 25% in 2019,” Noar stated. “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 examine requested 1,501 teenagers to charge seven randomly chosen vaping prevention adverts from a pool of greater than 200 adverts. Vaping prevention adverts that clearly communicated the well being harms of vaping, or in contrast vaping to cigarette smoking, had been comparatively more practical. Impartial or much less personally related content material, similar to referencing the environmental affect of vaping or the concentrating on of youth by the tobacco trade, was much less impactful.

“Though we anticipated that vaping prevention adverts with impartial or nice imagery wouldn’t be as efficient, we had been alarmed to seek out that flavor-related messages really heightened the attractiveness of vaping,” stated first writer Marcella H. Boynton, Ph.D., an assistant professor within the UNC Division of Normal Drugs 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 elements of e-cigarettes, even inside 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 attraction amongst each customers and non-users of e-cigarettes, which is an effective 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 research the consequences of different forms of anti-vaping adverts on a variety of audiences. In addition they are growing a sequence of messages and a companion web site to check the power of a textual content message-driven intervention to cut back youth vaping. In that regard, Noar notes, “We’ve been growing our personal evidence-based messages based mostly on the most recent science in regards to the harms of vaping. Our messaging method has been drastically influenced by the insights generated by this examine.”

The examine utilized UNC’s Vaping Prevention Useful resource, an internet site designed to supply practitioners, researchers and communities with vaping prevention media content material from all over the world, in addition to methods and assets for youth vaping prevention. It’s the largest repository of free, open-access vaping prevention supplies, all obtainable 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 College of Drugs, Winston-Salem, NC.