Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Sep 7, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 8, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Campus Smoking Policies and Smoking-Related Twitter Posts Originating from California Public Universities: An Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The number of colleges and universities with smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies has been increasing. The effects of campus smoking policies on overall sentiment, particularly among young adult populations, are more difficult to assess given the changing tobacco and e-cigarette product landscape and differential attitudes towards policy implementation and enforcement.
Objective:
The goal of the study was to retrospectively assess the campus climate towards tobacco use by comparing tweets from universities with and without smoke- or tobacco free campus policies.
Methods:
Geo-located Twitter posts from 2015 were collected using the Twitter public Application Programming Interface (API) in combination with cloud-computing services on Amazon Web Services. Posts were filtered for tobacco products and behavior keywords. A total of 42,877,339 posts were collected from 2015, with 2,837 originating from a UC or CSU system campus, and 758 of these manually verified to be about smoking. Chi-square tests were conducted to determine if there were significant differences in tweet user sentiment between campuses which were smoke- or tobacco-free (all UC campuses and CSU Fullerton) compared to those that were not. A separate content analysis of tweets included in Chi-square tests was conducted to identify major themes by campus smoking policy status.
Results:
The percentage of positive sentiment tweets toward tobacco use was higher on campuses without a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy than on campuses with a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy (76.7% vs. 66.4%, P=0.028). Higher positive sentiment on campuses without a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy may have been driven by general comments about one’s own smoking behavior and comments about smoking as a general behavior. A greater variety in types of positive sentiment tweets originating from campuses without a smoke-or tobacco-free policy may also contribute to differences in sentiment.
Conclusions:
Our study introduces preliminary data suggesting that campus smoke- and tobacco-free policies are associated with a reduction in positive sentiment toward smoking. However, continued expressions and intentions to smoke and reports of one’s own smoking among Twitter users suggests a need for more research to better understand the dynamics between implementation of smoke- and tobacco-free policies and resulting tobacco behavioral sentiment.
Citation
