Community-Driven Grassroots Intervention on Adolescent Vaping Attitudes, Harm Perceptions, and Knowledge: Randomized Controlled Trial
Abstract
Highlights Public health relevance—How does this work relate to a public health issue? Adolescent vaping is a significant and rising public health concern in Canada, where roughly 13% of youth aged 15 to 19 report past-30-day e-cigarette use, yet conventional school-based prevention programs have shown limited effectiveness. This study evaluates a community-driven, youth-developed video as a novel alternative to traditional expert-led vaping education for early adolescents. Public health significance—Why is this work of significance to public health? To our knowledge, this is one of the first randomized controlled trials to test whether a grassroots, youth-led intervention can outperform an expert-developed comparator, and it produced a significantly greater shift in adolescents’ e-cigarette harm perceptions (medium effect size) alongside higher ratings for enjoyment and perceived knowledge gain. The findings indicate that involving youth in the design of prevention messaging can enhance relatability and impact, while also identifying an important caution, namely that such messaging may overstate the harm of e-cigarettes relative to combustible cigarettes. Public health implications—What are the key implications or messages for practitioners, policy makers and/or researchers in public health? Schools and public health agencies may benefit from partnering with youth councils and community groups to co-develop prevention materials, treating grassroots initiatives as…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a randomized trial, done in people. Its evidence level is 2 of 5 (High · randomized trial). Randomized trials of a reasonable size are the strongest single-study design.
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