How Is Marijuana Vaping Portrayed on YouTube? Content, Features, Popularity and Retransmission of Vaping Marijuana YouTube Videos

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate how vaping marijuana, a novel but emerging risky health behavior, is portrayed on YouTube, and how the content and features of these YouTube videos influence their popularity and retransmission. A content analysis of vaping marijuana YouTube videos published between July 2014 to June 2015 (n = 214) was conducted. Video genre, valence, promotional and warning arguments, emotional appeals, message sensation value, presence of misinformation and misleading information, and user-generated statistics, including number of views, comments, shares, likes and dislikes, were coded. The results showed that these videos were predominantly pro-marijuana-vaping, with the most frequent videos being user-sharing. The genre and message features influenced the popularity, evaluations, and retransmission of vaping marijuana YouTube videos. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Acknowledgments

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We thank Seven Binns at the NORC for his help with the data collection, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments to improve this manuscript.

Notes

¹ We retrieved the original e-cigarette YouTube video data set using a broad set of keywords and rules, including 90 e-cigarette search terms focusing on multiple categories. Some terms represent brands (e.g., Njoy, Innokin, Kangertech), while others represent products (e.g., e-cigarette[s], e-cig[s], ecig[s], e-juice) or the behavior (e.g., vape[s], vaping, eversmoke). A full list of search terms is available upon request. We then filtered our e-cigarette archive of videos using a full set of marijuana terms: Cheeba, Dab (or Dabs or dabbing), Firefly, Ganja, g pen (or gpen), Hemp, Indica, Kush, Marijuana, Pax, Pot, Reefer, Sativa, Snoop Dogg, Weed.

² We coded whether the text in the thumbnail, if any, include any vaping- or marijuana-related word(s), word(s) indicating genre, and nonsubstantive visual enhancement.

³ Two researchers, who formulated the research questions and designed the study, and one naïve coder, who was blind to the research objectives and questions, first independently coded 25 video clips, with 10 of them used for training purpose. After the discrepancies were reconciled and the three independent coders reached an acceptable reliability coefficient, half of the remaining YouTube videos were independently coded by the naïve coder. When the coder completed coding half of the videos, all three coders examined another 15 videos, and the reliability was recalculated. After the three coders reached a satisfactory reliability and any disagreement was cleared, the coder coded the second half of the videos. When the naïve coder had 15 videos remaining to be coded, we repeated this procedure to confirm the reliability of coding the second half of the videos.

⁴ Details of the misinformation and misleading information are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this manuscript was supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) under Award Number P50CA179546.