$500,000 Awarded to Investigate Teenage Use of Smokeless Tobacco

Chieko Hara, University Relations

Page Dobbs, associate professor of public health.

Attorney General of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, awarded the U of A $500,096 from office research funds to investigate social media influencers’ messaging around smokeless tobacco, with an eye toward designing better prevention strategies targeting youth. The principal investigator will be Page Dobbs, a professor in the Department of Health, Human Performance and Recreation who focuses on tobacco regulatory sciences.

“Our kids are growing up in a world full of influences that didn’t exist as recently as 15 years ago,” Griffin said. “Understanding what impacts teenagers and how they can be guided to make good decisions as it relates to smokeless tobacco is an effort I am proud to support.”

Part of the two-year grant will be used to better understand how smokeless tobacco products like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches are marketed to youth ages 13-18 by social media influencers. This is easier said than done. Due to the way algorithms incorporate every choice someone makes on social media to determine the next range of choices, it can be difficult for researchers to duplicate the click paths by which teenagers arrive at content. As such, messaging designed for youth can be invisible to adults and the pathways impossible to recreate.

So the researchers will recruit a team of teenagers and college-age young adults to participate in a tobacco research advisory committee, the goal of which will be to help train AI programs to recognize tobacco-related marketing, hashtags and products. Building more comprehensive datasets will help researchers get a clearer idea of the scale of smokeless tobacco promotion on social media, as well as who it’s targeting and how it’s targeting them.

Concurrently, the researchers will be recruiting social media influencers for in-depth interviews. The purpose will be to learn what techniques and strategies influencers employ to market products. Ultimately, the researchers hope to identify effective strategies to discourage youth from using smokeless tobacco products.

“We need to learn about the key elements of developing content,” Dobbs said of the influencers. “What might be their hesitation when partnering on prevention? What might make it more attractive to work with someone on prevention? And what are their experiences working with industries, and what have they been asked to do?”

In summary she said, “All of this is to learn as much as possible about what's currently happening from both ends — from how kids view it to how it's being approached by creators — and then using that information to develop better prevention strategies. Having influencers help develop prevention content may look different than how I think it should because I didn't grow up at their age with a digital world.”

Ultimately, Dobbs hopes that what they learn from this grant can be used for their next study, in which they plan to develop, implement and evaluate prevention strategies with the assistance of social media influencers.

Dobbs will be joined by co-PIs Kara Lasater, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Leadership and Research Methods who specializes in school educational leadership, and Khoa Luu, a professor of computer science and computer engineering who specializes in training AI models to classify information.

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