Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Tob Control. 2022 May;31(3):402-410. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2020-055956. Epub 2020 Nov 13.
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.
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).
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 elicited higher perceived effectiveness for discouraging vaping (p <0.05), but including COVID-19 harms did not.
Messages linking smoking with COVID-19 may hold promise for discouraging smoking and may have the added benefit of also discouraging vaping.
COVID-19 大流行的速度和规模，加上卫生机构持续努力传播危害，使得需要数据来为有关吸烟、蒸气和 COVID-19 的信息传递提供信息。我们研究了对 COVID-19 和劝阻吸烟和蒸气的传统健康危害信息的反应。
参与者是 2020 年 5 月通过在线招募的美国全国便利样本中的 810 名成年人。所有人都参加了吸烟信息实验和蒸气信息实验，实验顺序随机。在每个实验中，参与者都查看了一条格式为 Twitter 帖子的信息。实验采用了 3（吸烟或蒸气的传统健康危害：三种危害，一种危害，不存在）×2（COVID-19 危害：一种危害，不存在）的被试间设计。结果包括感知信息有效性（主要）和烟草警告模型的构建（次要：注意力，负面情绪，认知深化，社会互动）。
与没有这些危害的控制信息相比，带有传统或 COVID-19 危害的信息对劝阻吸烟的效果更高（所有 p<0.001）。但是，在吸烟信息中同时包含传统和 COVID-19 危害并没有超过单独包含其中一种的好处。吸烟信息会影响烟草警告模型的构建，并且不会比控制信息引起更多的反应。吸烟信息也对劝阻蒸气的效果更高。在有关蒸气的信息中包含传统危害会提高劝阻蒸气的效果（p<0.05），但包含 COVID-19 危害则没有。
将吸烟与 COVID-19 联系起来的信息可能对劝阻吸烟有希望，并可能对劝阻蒸气有额外的好处。
