Social Media and Vaping
To what extent can social media influence choices regarding electronic cigarettes? Two scientists plan on finding out.
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by Dave Cross
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The pair plan on creating a real-time and continuously growing data set of what consumers and marketers say about e-cigarettes on sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as social media forums focused on e-cigarettes and “vaping”. Your comments on Planet of the Vapes will now be logged and analysed!
The data they collect will be mined to see why we use electronic cigarettes, how we believe vaping affects our health and if ecigs helped us quit smoking.
The investigation will also look at manufacturers and vendors. It plans to analyse how brands are marketed, how they are promoted on social media and how we respond.
Why are they doing this? What will this information be used for? The plan is to make the data and findings available as a tool for other researchers and healthcare professionals.
“There’s so much we don’t know about e-cigarettes,” says Leischow. “The scientific community has found mixed data on whether they’re helpful for smoking cessation, we have questions about how different flavourings impact use, particularly among minors, and many health professionals worry that e-cigarettes may ultimately lead to more young people taking up smoking. All of these blind spots around a product that is still totally unregulated make this a top priority area for the FDA.”
Although there are parts of his comment that will set alarm bells ringing in the heads of vapers, our comments will feed directly into this hive and therefore influence the findings.
Zeng explains how the survey presents advantages over previous survey-based studies:
- “The data comes from people interacting naturally in their day-to-day lives, thus removing “presentation bias” problems intrinsic in surveys
- The data collection is automated, which means sample size is not constrained by how much money or how many eyeball hours researchers can muster
- That lack of constraint also makes anecdotal information scientifically relevant: one personal story is just that, but 10,000 or 100,000 personal stories over time equal robust statistical data
- Finally, because content is processed by algorithms not people, data is available in near real-time, not months or even years later after countless hours of labour-intensive review.”
It may take a while but finally our anecdotal evidence of the success of vaping will count. Now get ready for a slew of forum threads asking you if vaping worked well or excellently for you!
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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