Reactions to messages about smoking, vaping and COVID-19: two national experiments.
Tob Control
; 31(3): 402-410, 2022 05.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-926886
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION:
The pace and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with ongoing efforts by health agencies to communicate harms, have created a pressing need for data to inform messaging about smoking, vaping, and COVID-19. We examined reactions to COVID-19 and traditional health harms messages discouraging smoking and vaping.METHODS:
Participants were a national convenience sample of 810 US adults recruited online in May 2020. All participated in a smoking message experiment and a vaping message experiment, presented in a random order. In each experiment, participants viewed one message formatted as a Twitter post. The experiments adopted a 3 (traditional health harms of smoking or vaping three harms, one harm, absent) × 2 (COVID-19 harms one harm, absent) between-subjects design. Outcomes included perceived message effectiveness (primary) and constructs from the Tobacco Warnings Model (secondary attention, negative affect, cognitive elaboration, social interactions).RESULTS:
Smoking messages with traditional or COVID-19 harms elicited higher perceived effectiveness for discouraging smoking than control messages without these harms (all p <0.001). However, including both traditional and COVID-19 harms in smoking messages had no benefit beyond including either alone. Smoking messages affected Tobacco Warnings Model constructs and did not elicit more reactance than control messages. Smoking messages also elicited higher perceived effectiveness for discouraging vaping. Including traditional harms in messages about vaping elicited higher perceived effectiveness for discouraging vaping (p <0.05), but including COVID-19 harms did not.CONCLUSIONS:
Messages linking smoking with COVID-19 may hold promise for discouraging smoking and may have the added benefit of also discouraging vaping.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Smoking
/
Health Communication
/
Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems
/
Vaping
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Observational study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Limits:
Adult
/
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Tob Control
Journal subject:
Substance-Related Disorders
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Tobaccocontrol-2020-055956
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