Research Projects
Project 1: Communicating the Risks of Harmful Cigarette Smoke Constituents
Principal Investigator, Noel T. Brewer, PhD
Project Description:
The project explores how people think about chemicals in cigarette smoke, building toward a randomized controlled trial of smokers’ reactions to constituent disclosures on their cigarette packs.
Our Aims:
Aim 1. Identify cigarette smoke constituents that adults and adolescents find threatening and discourage them from wanting to smoke.
Aim 2. Develop a library of cigarette smoke constituent disclosures.
Aim 3. Determine whether constituent disclosures on cigarette packs increase adult smokers’ intentions to quit smoking in an RCT.
Project 2: Effective Risk Communication on New and Emerging Tobacco Products
Principal Investigator, Erin L. Sutfin, PhD
Project Description:
This project explores adolescents’ and young adults’ beliefs and attitudes about non-cigarette tobacco products, such as little cigars and cigarillos, hookah, and electronic cigarettes, in order to develop messages that effectively communicate the risks of using these products.
Our Aims:
Aim 1: Identify perceived risks, knowledge of, and attitudes towards harmful constituents and health risks of 4 categories of OTPs among adolescents (age 13-17) and young adults (age 18-25) to inform development of OTP risk messages.
Aim 2: Develop risk messages for each OTP that increase risk perceptions among adolescents and young adults.
Aim 3: Establish the real-world impact of OTP risk messages (developed in Aim 2) appearing at the point-of-sale on risk perceptions, attitudes, knowledge, susceptibility and quit intentions of adolescents and young adults.
Project 3: Enhancing Source Credibility in Tobacco Regulatory Communications
Principal Investigator, Adam O. Goldstein, MD, MPH
Project Summary:
This project is interested in the source credibility of FDA as a regulator of tobacco products. We will characterize perceptions of FDA’s source credibility using focus group and survey data and experimentally examine determinants of source credibility, to create optimal messages. These messages will be used in a randomized controlled trial examining the relationship between source credibility of messages, and message effectiveness.
Our Aims:
Aim 1: Characterize perceptions of the FDA in terms of its (1) regulatory authority, (2) credibility, and (3) tobacco control communication campaigns among adolescents, young adults and adults, and among vulnerable populations (Black and gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB)).
Aim 2: Use FDA regulatory communication messages (developed by Project 1 of our CRRTC) to experimentally examine three determinants of source credibility (i.e., source sponsor, source depiction and source engagement) to create optimally framed messages and test them among current smokers.
Aim 3: Following a pilot to test intervention feasibility, conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 352 young adult and adult smokers to test the hypothesis that optimally framed (high source credibility) FDA cigarette constituent messages will increase intentions to quit more than sub-optimally framed (no source attached) cigarette constituent messages.