Vape Celebrities Research
University of Georgia researchers say celebrities make vaping more attractive.
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by Dave Cross
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The press release accompanying the study reads like it was written by someone approaching retirement who struggles with modern technology: “Social media is hugely popular in the internet age of today.” As it is, the journal submission simply struggles with trying to disguise its bias and shoddy science. Because, if you are forced to read the rest of it, the first warning sign is noticeable in the paper’s introduction: “…potentially carinogenic metals (Hess et al., 2017), with their use predicting subsequent tobacco uptake (Barrington-Trimis et al., 2016). In 2016…”
There we have it, in the second sentence, lead author Joe Phua couldn’t be bothered to spell check and correct “carinogenic “ to “carcinogenic”, and led a team that relies on a study by Jessica Barrington-Trimis. Barrington-Trimis has produced a stream of ridiculous and error-strewn pieces of research. Her study “Electronic-cigarette Use and Respiratory Symptoms in Adolescents” was slammed for being a piece of work of exceptionally poor quality.
The study to which Phua refers, Barrington-Trimis claims to find a progression link where there isn’t one. She completely invented it and now a subsequent study is reporting vaping acting as a gateway to smoking as if it were fact.
Phua’s team write: “Results of this study illustrate that celebrity endorsers in e-cigarette SNS [social media networks] brand pages can exert a strong effect on attitudes and e-cigarette smoking intentions. Celebrity endorsers in an e-cigarette Instagram page significantly increased positive attitudes towards e-cigarettes and e-cigarette smoking intentions compared to non- celebrity endorsers and product only pages.”
But there are problems with this study. For a start, the 141 students were shown images that had been enhanced in Photoshop by the researchers, thereby introducing bias as the study proved what it wanted to discover. Also, none of the students were screened for their attitudes to celebrities prior to being shown images. Lastly, none of the students were tracked to see if viewing these fake pictures had any impact on rates of taking up vaping.
It is shocking that the Journal of Health Psychology could bring itself to publish such a flimsy and amateur piece of work. The authors feel that their work raises implication for the creation of marketing regulations – maybe it should spur publishing journals to take harder looks at what they publish instead.
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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