Evaluating targeted anti-smoking messages for Asian Americans with high smoking prevalence

ABSTRACT Asian Americans (AAs) are the fastest growing racial group in the US. Although the prevalence of smoking across AA populations is about half of the national average, disaggregated data reveal a different picture: males of Vietnamese (24.4%), Korean (19.3%), and Filipino Americans (20.6%) report high smoking prevalence, up to two times higher than other Asian ethnic subgroups such as Chinese or Asian Indian males. New approaches are required to more effectively promote smoking cessation, such as appealing to people with the highest smoking rates. Health communication is an effective way to enhance population health outcomes, including tobacco use. Targeted health communication, developing messages that reflect unique characteristics of target audience, can be a key strategy to promote smoking cessation. The proposed research aims to assess the effectiveness of two different targeting strategies: deep (e.g., content reflecting target audience’s value systems) and surface structure (e.g., featuring similar-looking models) targeting in anti-smoking messages. The long-term goal of this research program is to inform effective and efficient intervention development that will enhance public health outcomes. The objective will be addressed in two aims: (1) Examine the acceptability of targeted anti-smoking messages among Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino American smokers using in-depth interviews; (2) assess the effectiveness of surface and deep structure targeting strategies among Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino American smokers using an experiment. The proposed research will use four types of anti-smoking messages: a) deep and surface structure targeted; b) deep structure only targeted; c) surface structure only targeted; and d) non-targeted messages. Study 1 will use in-depth interviews to examine how AA smokers respond to messages with different targeting strategies. Study 2 will use 2X2 between-subject online experiment to assess the effectiveness of deep and surface structure targeting strategies by observing how outcome variables differ across the conditions. We will examine the main and interaction effects of the two targeting strategies, as well as their relative effectiveness. The proposed research is innovative because this is one of the first studies to apply analytical approaches based on message effects theories to systematically manipulate specific message components to assess the effects of various targeting strategies, including their relative effectiveness. Also, this study is the first to evaluate message effects using a volumetric choice experiment that estimates individual-level price elasticity and cigarette demand, in addition to other self-reported measurements.