Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jan 24, 2021
Date Accepted: Aug 8, 2021
Project Spring: Examining Risk and Protective Factors for Cigarette Smoking Among Transgender and Gender Expansive Individuals Using Digital Photovoice
ABSTRACT
Background:
Transgender and gender expansive (TGE) adults are twice as likely to smoke cigarettes than cisgender individuals. There is a critical gap in research on effective and culturally-sensitive approaches to reduce smoking prevalence among TGE adults.
Objective:
This study aimed to qualitatively examine the risk and protective factors of cigarette smoking among TGE adults through real-world exemplars.
Methods:
We conducted a digital photovoice study among a purposeful sample of 47 TGE adults ages 18+ and currently smoke in the US (March 2019-April 2020). Participants uploaded photos daily that depicted smoking risk and protective factors they experienced over 21 days on either private Facebook or Instagram groups. We next conducted separate focus group discussions to explore experiences of these factors among a subset of participants from each group. We analyzed participants’ photos, captions, and focus group transcripts and generated themes associated with smoking risk and protected factors.
Results:
We identified six major themes of risk and protective factors of smoking among TGE individuals including (1) experience of stress, (2) gender affirmation, (3) health consciousness, (4) social influences, (5) routine behaviors, and (6) environmental cues. We describe and illustrate each theme using exemplar photos and quotes.
Conclusions:
These findings will inform future community engaged research to develop culturally tailored interventions to reduce smoking prevalence among TGE individuals. Clinical Trial: Not applicable.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.