A Major NIH Grant Will Help Researchers Study Messaging About Risks of Tobacco Products

The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce a major grant from the National Institutes of Health Tobacco Regulatory Science Program, an interagency partnership between the FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been awarded to a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University to study public health communication messaging about the continuum of risk for tobacco products.

In 2022, an estimated 62.9 million people aged 15 years and older in the United States used tobacco products. This grant, totaling $9.6 million for the next four years, will help the researchers study effective ways to share the relative risks of tobacco products with multiple audiences, especially with youth and adults who use combustible tobacco. 

The research team is led by Meghan Moran (C'03) of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Andy Tan of the Annenberg School for Communicaton and represents multiple disciplines (communication, public health, psychiatry) and areas of expertise (tobacco regulatory science, nicotine dependence, behavioral economics, and health equity).

“This project will be one of the first to conduct a broad evaluation of the impacts that messaging about the varying levels of risks associated with tobacco products may have among various population segments,” says Tan, director of the Health Communication and Equity Lab at Annenberg, describing the twin goals of the project. “We have two complementary objectives in this research; the first is to communicate accurate information with adults who use combustible forms of tobacco so they can make informed decisions to use less harmful forms of tobacco, if they are unable to quit. Our second goal is to ensure that such messages do not lead to unintended effects of making tobacco products appealing to youth.”

The current research on this topic lacks evidence from the diverse audience that these messages must reach, differences in message content, the continuum of key outcomes including tobacco use behavior (e.g., cessation, product switching, initiation), and the impact of repeated message exposures in the real world. 

The research will aim to generate a ranking of these messages and assess effectiveness and comprehension of the messages among adult users of combustible tobacco and youth/young adults using a study design that captures a full range of outcomes - from immediate message response and receptivity to longer-term behavior.

Moran, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, outlined the multifaceted study design. “Our team has developed a comprehensive and adaptive strategy that incorporates cutting-edge methodologies like large-scale surveys, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, behavioral economics, and ecological momentary assessment," she says. “We believe that this is the first of its kind research to integrate these complementary methods to provide a rigorous, full-spectrum assessment of message impact.”

With the successful completion of this project, the researchers hope to provide the FDA with the effects of the messages provided for this study, along with insights about broader message strategies to optimize future public health communication for youth and adults who use tobacco products.

Researchers at Penn include Drs. Tan, Robert Hornik, and Joseph Cappella at the Annenberg School and Drs. Andrew Strasser and Janet Audrain-McGovern at the Perelman School of Medicine.