Social Media Anti-Vaping Messages to Reduce ENDS Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority Teens (SMART)

October 2, 2025 updated by: Andy Tan, Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Medicine

SMART: Social Media Anti-Vaping Messages to Reduce ENDS Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority Teens

The investigators long-term goal is to reduce tobacco use and tobacco-related health disparities among SGM populations. The objective of Project SMART (Social Media Anti-Vaping Messages to Reduce ENDS Use Among Sexual and Gender Minority Teens) is to evaluate the effectiveness of an sexual gender minority (SGM) -tailored social media intervention to prevent vaping initiation among SGM youth ages 13-20 years. The investigators central hypothesis is that SGM-tailored anti-vaping social media messages will be more effective than existing non-tailored messages to prevent vaping initiation among SGM youth. The scientific premise for this work is based on principles of cultural tailoring in health communication for vulnerable populations, the Health Equity Promotion Model, and the Message Impact Framework. The investigators are developing and evaluating a social media intervention because SGM youth have a high rate of social media use and are more likely to go online for health information than non-SGM youth. Social media, moreover, are increasingly used for health promotion to address health disparities and well-being of SGM populations. The investigators will conduct rapid-cycle feedback with stakeholders including SGM organization leaders to provide input on the message design, testing, and intervention implementation to ensure feasibility and acceptability of the intervention.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

Aim 1: Explore salient beliefs and cultural tailoring preferences related to vaping initiation among sexual gender minority (SGM) youth to inform the development of anti-vaping social media messages.

Approach: An elicitation survey among 80 SGM youth and focus group discussions among a subsample of 48-64 youth who complete the elicitation survey will explore beliefs related to vaping initiation that SGM youth find most salient. Participants will include US SGM youth, ages 12-18 years, stratified by age (12-15 or 16-18), vaping status (never vaped and are susceptible or have initiated vaping in the past 1 year), and gender identity (cisgender or transgender/gender expansive). The investigators will further explore the social contexts of their vaping behavior and preferences for cultural tailoring of anti-vaping messages (i.e., peripheral, evidential, linguistic, and sociocultural values tailoring) among SGM youth.

Aim 2: Identify promising anti-vaping social media messages and cultural tailoring strategies to reduce vaping initiation among SGM youth.

Approach: Results from Aim 1 and input from community stakeholders will be utilized to develop SGM-tailored social media anti-vaping messages. An online discrete choice experiment among SGM youth ages 13-18 years (n=600) who have never vaped will be used to test the impact of anti-vaping messages and cultural tailoring strategies on perceived message effectiveness to reduce vaping initiation. Results will guide the construction of culturally tailored anti-vaping social media intervention for broader evaluation in Aim 3.

Aim 3: Evaluate the effectiveness of repeated exposure to SGM-tailored anti-vaping social media messages on subsequent vaping susceptibility among SGM youth.

Approach: The investigators will conduct a prospective 2-group randomized experiment among 1500 SGM youth and young adults ages 13-20 to test the hypothesis that repeated exposure to SGM-tailored anti-vaping social media messages will be associated with reduced vaping susceptibility, defined as the extent to which youth are open to vaping, compared with non-tailored messages.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

1155

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • Pennsylvania
      • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, 19104
        • University of Pennsylvania

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Child
  • Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Identify as SGM
  • ages 13-20
  • not vaped or used other tobacco products in the past 30 days
  • have access to a smartphone
  • Able to read and speak in English
  • willing to receive messages via texting for the study
  • susceptible to e-cigarette use at intake (i.e., those do not state "definitely not" to all three susceptibility questions).

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Current vapers
  • Non-SGM youth

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Prevention
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Tailored
Participants in the tailored arm will receive SGM-tailored anti-vaping health messages delivered via text message
Other: Tailored
Messages will be in the form of high-quality English-language anti-vaping messages comprising static text and imagery designed to resemble social media posts (e.g., image and a caption). We will create 24 messages based on the top-ranked tailoring features and belief themes tested in Aim 2 to comprise SGM-tailored messages. For the non-tailored message condition, we will create 24 anti-vaping social media messages that mirror the SGM-tailored messages but do not contain SGM identity cues. We will match the belief themes used in the tailored and non-tailored messages such that they represent a range of belief targets (e.g., addiction, physical health effects, mental health effects) as indicated in Aims 1 and 2. We do not utilize a social media platform for the delivery of the message to avoid potential contamination across randomized conditions.
Other Names:
  • SGM tailored messages
No Intervention: Non-Tailored
Participants in the non-tailored arm will receive non-tailored anti-vaping health messages delivered via text message

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Susceptibility to vaping
Time Frame: One week, Two weeks, Three weeks, and One month

We will measure susceptibility to vaping using four items previously used on PATH Wave 7 youth questionnaire and NYTS 2022 Questionnaire:

  1. Have you ever been curious about using an e-cigarette or other electronic nicotine products? (1 = Not at all curious; 2 = A little curious; 3 = Somewhat curious; 4 = Very curious)
  2. Do you think you will use an e-cigarette or an electronic nicotine product in the next year? (1 = Definitely not; 2 = Probably not; 3 = Probably yes; 4 = Definitely yes)
  3. Do you think you will use an e-cigarette or an electronic nicotine product soon? (1 = Definitely not; 2 = Probably not; 3 = Probably yes; 4 = Definitely yes)
  4. If one of your best friends were to offer you an e-cigarette or an electronic nicotine product, would you use it? (1 = Definitely not; 2 = Probably not; 3 = Probably yes; 4 = Definitely yes)

The responses to these items will be averaged to create a score of vaping susceptibility.
One week, Two weeks, Three weeks, and One month

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Vaping initiation
Time Frame: One week, Two weeks, Three weeks, and One month

We will measure vaping initiation in the past 1 week using one item:

1) Have you used an e-cigarette or vape, even once or twice in the past week? (1 = Yes; 2 = No)
One week, Two weeks, Three weeks, and One month

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Medicine

Collaborators

University of Florida

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

February 21, 2024

Primary Completion (Actual)

August 15, 2025

Study Completion (Actual)

August 15, 2025

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

January 3, 2024

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

March 6, 2024

First Posted (Actual)

March 13, 2024

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Estimated)

October 7, 2025

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

October 2, 2025

Last Verified

October 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • UPCC 13023
  • 849052 (Other Identifier: University of Pennsylvania)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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