April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Responses to Vaping Warning Themes for Adolescents: A National Experiment
Introduction. About one in five US high school students currently vape. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only requires one warning about nicotine addiction to appear on vaping devices, yet little is known about whether additional message themes could discourage vaping among adolescents. This experiment sought to examine responses to and identify the most compelling themes in vaping warnings for US adolescents. Methods. Participants were a national probability sample of 623 US adolescents aged 13-17, recruited in summer 2020. Adolescents were randomized to one of five warning message themes about the health effects of vaping: 1) chemical harms, 2) lung harms, 3) COVID-19 harms, 4) nicotine addiction, or 5) control (messages about vape litter). The primary outcome was perceived message effectiveness (PME; 3-item scale). Secondary outcomes were negative affect, attention, anticipated social interactions, and message novelty (all single items). We ran ANOVAs to evaluate differences among the warning conditions, using PME and our secondary outcomes as dependent variables. We computed pairwise comparisons for all ANOVAs using Tukey HSD. Exploratory analyses examined whether participant vaping status (characterized as current vaper/at-risk of vaping vs. not at-risk of vaping) moderated the effect of warning conditions on PME. Results. The mean age of adolescents was 15 years. Most participants reported being female (53%) and white (65%), and roughly one-fifth (19%) identified as Hispanic. A modest proportion of adolescents were current vapers (14%), while 47% were at-risk of vaping and 39% were not at-risk of vaping. Adolescents perceived the chemical, lung, and COVID-19 harms warning message themes as more effective than nicotine addiction and control (all p < .05), while nicotine addiction outperformed control (p < .05). The chemical, lung, and COVID-19 harms warning themes also elicited greater negative affect than nicotine addiction and control (all ps < .05). For all other secondary outcomes, the COVID-19 harms warning message theme outperformed nicotine addiction and control (all p < .05). Lastly, exploratory analyses showed no interaction effect between warning message theme and participant vaping status for our primary outcome of PME (p >.05). Conclusion. Results showed that adolescents perceived warning messages about the lung, chemical, and COVID-19 health harms of vaping as more effective than those about nicotine addiction, the topic of the current FDA waring. In addition, adolescents perceived warning messages about the COVID-19 health effects of vaping as more novel and attention grabbing, as eliciting more negative affect, and were more likely to anticipate sharing the messages with others than warnings about nicotine addiction or littering. These promising results can inform both future research and policy—for instance, by systematically developing, implementing, and evaluating new warning messages for e-cigarette packaging and advertisements that discourage youth vaping.