Social Media Anti-Vaping Messages to Reduce ENDS Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority Teens

Aim 1: Explore salient beliefs and cultural tailoring preferences related to vaping initiation among sexual gender minority (SGM) youth to inform the development of anti-vaping social media messages. Approach: An elicitation survey among 80 SGM youth and focus group discussions among a subsample of 48-64 youth who complete the elicitation survey will explore beliefs related to vaping initiation that SGM youth find most salient. Participants will include US SGM youth, ages 12-18 years, stratified by age (12-15 or 16-18), vaping status (never vaped and are susceptible or have initiated vaping in the past 1 year), and gender identity (cisgender or transgender/gender expansive). The investigators will further explore the social contexts of their vaping behavior and preferences for cultural tailoring of anti-vaping messages (i.e., peripheral, evidential, linguistic, and sociocultural values tailoring) among SGM youth. Aim 2: Identify promising anti-vaping social media messages and cultural tailoring strategies to reduce vaping initiation among SGM youth. Approach: Results from Aim 1 and input from community stakeholders will be utilized to develop SGM-tailored social media anti-vaping messages. An online discrete choice experiment among SGM youth ages 13-18 years (n=600) who have never vaped will be used to test the impact of anti-vaping messages and cultural tailoring strategies on perceived message effectiveness to reduce vaping initiation. Results will guide the construction of culturally tailored anti-vaping social media intervention for broader evaluation in Aim 3. Aim 3: Evaluate the effectiveness of repeated exposure to SGM-tailored anti-vaping social media messages on subsequent vaping susceptibility among SGM youth. Approach: The investigators will conduct a prospective 2-group randomized experiment among 1500 SGM youth and young adults ages 13-20 to test the hypothesis that repeated exposure to SGM-tailored anti-vaping social media messages will be associated with reduced vaping susceptibility, defined as the extent to which youth are open to vaping, compared with non-tailored messages.