Identifying and Addressing the Effects of Social Media Use on Young Adults' E-Cigarette Use: A Solutions-Oriented Approach

The overall goals of this project are to understand how young adults' social media use affects their nicotine vaping and to identify intervention targets that mitigate social media's impact on vaping. Prevalence of vaping and social media use among young adults have increased in tandem. Exposure to vaping-related social media content is common and is associated with vaping. Intense social media use appears to contribute to young adults' increased mental health symptoms, which are linked to tobacco product use. This project aims to contribute to scientific understanding of the causal links between social media use and vaping in young adulthood. Young adults with past-month vaping will report time spent on social media, vaping-related social media content exposure, social comparison on social media, mental health, and vaping behavior. After a 1-month baseline measurement period, they will be randomized to reduce their social media use (incentivized) or use social media as usual for a 3-month experimental period. Longitudinal within- and between-subjects analyses will test relationships between time spent on social media, risk factors for vaping, and vaping behavior. Specific research aims are to: (1) investigate the relationships between a reduction in social media use and: a) vaping content exposure, b) social comparison, and c) mental health, and (2) examine whether reducing social media use reduces past-month vaping days, vaping episodes per vaping day, and puffs per vaping episode.