When Principal Kimberly Martin sent out the Woodrow Wilson High School weekly newsletter over winter break, she was looking for help.
NBC NEWS, JANUARY 2019:
When Principal Kimberly Martin sent out the Woodrow Wilson High School weekly newsletter over winter break, she was looking for help. Martin’s school, the largest in the nation’s capital, was experiencing the same phenomenon that teachers and principals across the country have described over the last year — an explosion in teen e-cigarette use — but her budget didn’t allow for the substance abuse program she’d used at her previous school.
In her newsletter, Martin quoted Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had just called youth vaping an epidemic and posted pictures of e-cigarettes that had been confiscated on campus. “When I got here, I would say there was an issue with it, but I think it’s gotten worse, progressively worse, over the last four years,” said Martin, who estimates that roughly half of the juniors and seniors are using e-cigarettes.
Struggling to grapple with the epidemic, the Food and Drug Administration is holding a public hearing Friday to solicit ideas on the best interventions to curb youth e-cigarette use. Among the presenters at the forum in Silver Spring, Maryland, will be Truth Initiative, a nonprofit best known for its envelope-pushing anti-smoking ads aimed at teens and young people. The group has now created a first-of-its kind text messaging program designed to help young people quit vaping.
“We started seeing more and more that people were posting that their New Year’s resolution was to leave JUUL and to quit e-cigarettes, but they weren’t finding any help,” said Megan Jacobs, who works on Truth’s innovations team and led the project. “So we said, ‘Hey, we’ve got programs. We could adapt those programs to help people quit e-cigarettes as well as we could help them quit smoking.'” The program allows anyone to text “QUIT” to 202-804-9884, anonymously and free of charge. Users are then asked to choose an age bracket so they can start receiving tailored daily text messages of support and tips for quitting. Truth worked with young people who had either quit or were trying to quit, to make the program’s messaging more effective.
According to the latest CDC data, 3.05 million high school students and 570,000 middle-schoolers were using e-cigarettes in 2018. That’s a total of 3.62 million kids, up from only 280,000 in 2011. The numbers have spiked since the 2015 introduction of Juul, a cartridge-based e-cigarette that’s been wildly popular with kids. Current use among high school students rose 78 percent in a single year, from 2017 to 2018.
Dr. Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine whose research centers on adolescent addiction and substance use, said there is still a sizable gap in researchers’ understanding of e-cigarette use and how drug therapies may affect young vapers. Krishnan-Sarin said behavioral approaches, on the other hand, have a proven track record when it comes to youth smokers. “Not telling kids what to do, but educating them about what’s bad about the product, these kinds of behavioral techniques have shown to be effective for youth smoking combustible cigarettes,” she said. “We have found over time that if you educate kids and make them understand by presenting information to them in a non-judgmental fashion, they come to the conclusion themselves.”
The Truth Initiative adopts the same philosophy, offering users messages focused on delivering education and motivation rather than fear. “You can’t frighten people into changing their behavior. It doesn’t work in losing weight, it doesn’t work in exercise, and it doesn’t work here,” Truth Initiative CEO Robin Koval said.
Ensuring you discuss each construct of the Theory of Planned Behavior, please (a) define each construct generally, and; (b) explain how each could be employed in the context of this intervention to reduce the vaping trend amongst high school students. (Note: you do not need to develop an overall intervention or discuss every programmatic activity, simply define each construct and explain how each would specifically apply in this health context.)
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