CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY TOBACCO-FREE POLICIES

To better understand compliance with university tobacco-free policies, this project engaged in in-depth discussions with students and employees on two California public 4-year universities and used digital surveillance to understand why people continue to smoke and vape on tobacco-free universities. Funding was provided by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.


RESEARCH TEAM MEMBERS

Meet our interdisciplinary research team members that were involved in this project from shared fields of public health, cognitive science, data science, and policy and legal analysis.

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Project PI:
Joshua Yang, PhD

Institution:
CSU Fullerton

Contact information:
tmackey[at]ucsd.edu


Team Members:
Raphael E. Cuomo, PhD
Vidya Purushothaman, MPH
Michael Haupt, MA
Qing Xu, MAS

Academic Presentations, Media Coverage, Blogs, etc.

This section includes oral and poster presentations at conferences, news and media coverage, and other research dissemination activities

Poster
Other
Presentation
Media
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Poster

Cuomo RE, Purushothaman V, Li J, Bardier C, Nali M, Shah N, Obradovish N, Yang J, Mackey TK. Characteristics of tobacco-related tweets originating from California college campuses from 2015-2019


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Poster

Yang J, Mackey TK, Sou A, Faruqui A. Knowledge and Attitudes Toward e-cigarette, or Vaping, Product use-associated Lung Injury (EVALI) Among Tobacco using Young Adults

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Poster

Yang JS, Sou A, Faruqui A, Mackey TK. Young Adult Nicotine Users’ Attitudes and Responses to EVALI.


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Poster

Cuomo RE, Purushothaman VL, Li J, Bardier B, Nali M, Shah N, Obradovish N, Yang J, Mackey TK. Characterizing Smoking-Related Tweets from California College Campuses

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Poster

Yang JS, Sou A, Faruqui A, Mackey TK. Knowledge, Attitudes and Experiences with Tobacco-free University Policies Among Tobacco-using Employees and Students



Project Publications

This section includes academic papers that have been published, are in press, are under review, or are in progress

  • Number of Publications:
Published
Other
In review
In progress
Project Publications

This section includes academic papers that have been published, are in press, are under review, or are in progress

  • Number of Publications:
Published
Other
In review
In progress
Published
Cuomo RE, Purushothaman VL, Li J, Bardier C, Nali M, Shah N, Obradovich N, Yang J, Mackey TK. Characterizing Self-reported Tobacco, Vaping, and Marijuana-related Tweets Geolocated for California College Campuses. Front in Pub Health. 2021; in press

Introduction: College-aged youth are active on social media yet smoking-related social media engagement in these populations has not been thoroughly investigated. We sought to conduct an exploratory infoveillance study focused on geolocated data to characterize smoking-related tweets originating from California four-year colleges on Twitter.
Methods: Tweets from 2015-2019 with geospatial coordinates in CA college campuses containing smoking-related keywords were collected from the Twitter API stream and manually annotated for discussions about smoking product type, sentiment, and behavior.
Results:
Out of all tweets detected with smoking-related behavior, 46.7% related to tobacco use, 50.0% to marijuana, and 7.3% to vaping. Of these tweets, 46.1% reported first-person use or second-hand observation of smoking behavior. Out of 962 tweets with user sentiment, the majority (67.6%) were positive, ranging from 55.0% for California State University, Long Beach to 95.8% for California State University, Los Angeles.
Discussion:
We detected reporting of first- and second-hand smoking behavior on CA college campuses representing possible violation of campus smoking bans. The majority of tweets expressed positive sentiment about smoking behaviors, though there was appreciable variability between college campuses. This suggests that anti-smoking outreach should be tailored to the unique student populations of these college communities.
Conclusion:
Among tweets about smoking from California colleges, high levels of positive sentiment suggest that the campus climate may be less receptive to anti-smoking messages or adherence to campus smoking bans. Further research should investigate the degree to which this varies by campuses over time and following implementation of bans including validating using other sources of data.


In review
Yang JY, Sou A, Faruqui A, Mackey TK. A qualitative examination of e-cigarette use among California young adults in light of the EVALI outbreak. in review.

To be added



Project Data Resources

This section includes project datasets that can be downloaded for further research purposes. Due to different restrictions, some of the data has had fields removed. For details please contact study team

  • Number of Data Assets: 3
Dataset
Data Dictionary
Other
Dataset

To be added


Data Dictionary

To be added


Dataset

To be added



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