Identifying Potential Campaign Themes to Prevent Youth Initiation of E-Cigarettes

INTRODUCTION: Once a target audience and a health behavior of interest are selected for a potential media campaign, the next task is selecting beliefs about the health behavior to serve as the basis for campaign message content. For novel health behaviors, such as the use of emerging tobacco products, limited empirical research on beliefs about these behaviors exists. We applied a multi-method approach to generate potential campaign beliefs for emerging behaviors. METHODS: We conducted three methods in this investigation in order to generate a list of potential testable campaign beliefs, using youth electronic cigarette use as a case study: (1) a search of published and unpublished literature including gathering measures from several national surveys, (2) an online elicitation survey, and (3) unsupervised topic modeling of media texts. RESULTS: We detail how we employed each method to both generate and prioritize beliefs related to youth e-cigarette use into a final set of 115 beliefs across 23 belief themes. DISCUSSION: We argue this multi-method approach can provide four utilities when thinking through a health campaign for novel health behaviors: 1) developing an exhaustive and complementary list of beliefs; 2) generating overarching themes and distilling larger themes into more nuanced beliefs; 3) identifying language most relevant to the target population; and 4) prioritizing beliefs for message pilot testing with members of the target audience.