This past school year, I took a course at my high school where I was required to write a research paper on a topic I found to be interesting, current, or relevant to the community. With this in mind, I decided to research what scientists, congressional members, and parents have been debating for the last decade: vaping.
My research investigated whether viewing electronic cigarette promotions on Instagram made teens create a more positive perception of vaping. I created an online survey asking 142 students from a high school in South Florida about their opinions of e-cigarettes.
Half of the students viewed e-cigarette promotions found on Instagram before answering the survey while the other half didn’t. If my hypothesis held, the group that viewed the e-cigarette promotions before answering the questions should have had a more positive perception of vaping than the group that had not viewed the promotions. However, after performing a statistical test, the results did not show this.
The Food and Drug Administration's new "The Real Cost" anti-vaping campaign starts Tuesday.
Both groups responded almost exactly the same to questions measuring their perception of vaping. Thus, my hypothesis was rejected: Viewing e-cigarette promotions on Instagram does not influence the way teens at that Florida high school think about vaping.
However, my study did reveal a finding that may have saved it from being a complete flop. Towards the end of the survey, I tacked on a question that wasn’t entirely related to my research question, but would help answer something I was genuinely curious about: Are the anti-e-cigarette campaigns that aim to discourage teens from using vape products actually effective?
An overwhelming majority of the students claimed anti-e-cigarette campaigns, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's The Real Cost, were not at all effective at preventing teens from vaping. In fact, only 20% of the teens said they had ever viewed anti-e-cigarette information on social media; the other 80% claimed to have only seen promotions or posts of their friends using e-cigarettes.
This brought to light several questions — namely, whether the methods currently being used to prevent teen nicotine addiction are reaching the audience they’re intended for. Should organizations like the FDA quit showing videos of possessed demons and Wolverine-like monsters to try to get teens to stop vaping? Are the 30-second commercials being aired on children’s television programs really that compelling to social media-crazed teens?
While e-cigarette promotions on social media may not have as big of an impact on teens as I’d originally thought, studies in the field have shown other types of posts, like those of teens and young adults vaping (referred to as “peer-posts”), do influence adolescents and encourage similar behaviors.
Ironically, it seems the seemingly innocent posts of individuals using e-cigarettes, and not the promotions themselves, may be doing the real promoting here. If organizations like the FDA truly want to curtail teen vaping, they’re going to have to face it head-on, and in the same arena. That said, it may be necessary they shift their attention away from unconvincing television commercials and toward more realistic, fact-based appeals through social media.
Additionally, the FDA might want to consider legal action. As of recently, the FDA rejected the premarket application of the popular vape company, JUUL. This doesn’t come as a surprise considering that the FDA was already on the company’s case about its youth-appealing social media content in 2018.
While the JUUL empire is likely near its fall, there are dozens of other e-cigarette companies that are still being authorized to sell their vapes. These vapes often find their way to teens, who then influence their friends by posting on the platform they know best: social media.
If the FDA wants to put an end to this issue once and for all, it’s not only going to have to improve its communication with teens, but it will also have to target all the vape companies — not just JUUL — that are providing them with the product in the first place.
Regardless of the path taken, it is clear that there need to be better strategies in place if we want to mitigate — in the words of the U.S. Surgeon General — this teen vape epidemic.
Also read:
FDA bans Juul e-cigarettes tied to teen vaping surge
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