How Does Social Media Exposure and Engagement Influence College Students’ Use of ENDS Products? A Cross-lagged Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT

Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) products have been marketed heavily on social media throughout the past years, which exerts great influence on young adults’ ENDS use. Despite scholars’ pioneering efforts in investigating the influence of tobacco and nicotine products marketing on young adults’ vaping behavior, scholarly attention has been paid primarily to passive exposure to rather than active engagement with the information on social media. In addition, the majority of existing research has been cross-sectional or focused on the unidirectional path from marketing information to behavior. To extend previous research in tobacco regulatory science on new media, we examined the bidirectional associations between self-reported exposure to and engagement with tobacco and nicotine products messaging on social media, and subsequent use of ENDS products one year later among a large, diverse sample of young adults. Results from cross-lagged panel analyses indicated that pro-tobacco/ENDS engagement and advertising exposure elevated risk whereas anti-tobacco/ENDS engagement decreased risk for the subsequent use of ENDS products one year later. On the other hand, the use of ENDS products positively predicted both pro- and anti-tobacco/ENDS engagement one year later. Findings provide empirical support for the reasoned action approach and the confirmation bias rooted in cognitive dissonance theory through rigorous longitudinal examination. Our findings not only point to the imperativeness of and offer guidance for regulating marketing information on social media, but also suggest social media as a promising platform to prevent young adults from initiating ENDS product use.

Acknowledgments

Research reported in this publication was supported by grant number [1 P50 CA180906] from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the FDA.

Notes

1. In total, 4,561 students participated at T1 (spring 2017). Among these participants, we removed 116 cases, who had at least one missing value on exogenous variables, which can not be accomodated by the WLSMV estimator. Therefore, the final sample size for cross-lagged analysis is 4,268.

2. According to Li (2014), the WLSMV estimation implemented in the current study is robust to non-normal data because it “make[s] no distributional assumption germane to the shape of observed variables” (p. 29). Therefore, the low mean and non-normality of tobacco/ENDS social media exposure and engagement variables are unlikely to influence the robustness of the results.

3. Chi-square value is almost always statistically significant when the sample size is over 400 (Bentler & Bonett, 1980; Kenny, 2020). Therefore, we decided the model fit in the current study based on other indices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [1 P50 CA180906].