Identifying Potential Campaign Themes to Prevent Youth Initiation of E-Cigarettes

Abstract

Once a target audience and a health behavior of interest are selected for a potential mass media campaign, the next task is selecting beliefs about the health behavior to serve as the basis for campaign message content. For novel health behaviors, such as the use of emerging tobacco products, limited empirical research on beliefs about these behaviors exists. A multimethod approach was applied to generate potential campaign beliefs for emerging behaviors. Three methods were conducted in this investigation in order to generate a list of potential testable campaign beliefs, using youth e-cigarette use as a case study: (1) a search of published and unpublished literature including gathering measures from several national surveys (through 2016), (2) an online elicitation survey (conducted in 2016), and (3) unsupervised topic modeling of media texts (from 2014 to 2015, analyzed in 2016). Details are provided on how each method was employed to both generate and prioritize beliefs related to youth e-cigarette use into a final set of 115 beliefs across 23 belief themes. This multimethod approach can provide four utilities when thinking through a health campaign for novel health behaviors: (1) developing an exhaustive and complementary list of beliefs, (2) generating overarching themes and distilling larger themes into more nuanced beliefs, (3) identifying language most relevant to the target population, and (4) prioritizing beliefs for message pilot testing with members of the target audience. Supplement information: This article is part of a supplement entitled Fifth Anniversary Retrospective of "The Real Cost," the Food and Drug Administration's Historic Youth Smoking Prevention Media Campaign, which is sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

A Breath of Knowledge: Overview of Current Adolescent E-cigarette Prevention and Cessation Programs

“…Published data across programs are inconsistent with regard to information about program development, formative research, theoretical foundations, key principals and aims, modes of delivery, qualitative justification, reach, partnerships, evidence used in designing and updating content, measures of success, implementation research on acceptability and feasibility, and emphasis placed on the e-cigarette content. On the contrary, ecigarette counter-marketing campaigns set a good example of publishing details on how they are developed and designed [91,92]. Few educational programs describe the details of how they were developed, and thus it is difficult to distinguish which are most rigorous with respect to one another.…”

Content analysis of the use of fear in The Real Cost Youth E-cigarette Prevention Campaign

“…The FDA campaign's fear-based tactics may have not been appropriate because there is no desirable behavioral modeling. From the theoretical approach of the host-agent-vector environment framework, this FDA campaign may be further improved by providing more actionable strategies [28,43]. Fear messages used in these public health messages should be assessed further to determine the longterm effectiveness since it can backfire if they are rejected by the target audience.…”

Will E-Cigarette Modified Risk Messages with a Nicotine Warning Polarize Smokers’ Beliefs about the Efficacy of Switching Completely to E-Cigarettes in Reducing Smoking-Related Risks?

“…The sample also had a small number of former smokers who had consumed at least 100 cigarettes in their life and had quit smoking in the past two years. Similar to previous tobacco communication and behavior research [ 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 ], we recruited participants from Toluna, a commercial research company. Toluna has “the worlds’ largest online social voting community” (p. 1) [ 56 ], with more than 36 million registered participants available for various types of online surveys around the world.…”