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

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list of potential testable campaign beliefs, using youth e-cigarette use as a case study: (1) a search of published and unpublished literature including gathering measures from several national surveys (through 2016), (2) an online elicitation survey (conducted in 2016), and (3)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.