Smoking versus vaping: how (not) to communicate their relative harms

Peter Ayton and Leonardo Weiss-Cohen

Journal of Risk Research, 2021, vol. 24, issue 2, 198-214

Abstract: Here we consider how the relative harms of two nicotine products were communicated in a public health campaign. Following a peer-reviewed evaluation that rated the relative harm of a range of nicotine products relative to the harm of smoking, and which rated the relative harm of vaping as about 5% that of smoking (D. J. Nutt et al., 2014 European Addiction Research, 20(5), 218–225), the UK government launched a campaign which transposed these relative harms into relative safety, promoting the message that “vaping is 95% safer than smoking”. We discuss the communication issues arising from transposing a measure of relative harms into relative safety and report the results of an experiment which shows that significantly more people correctly appreciated the ratio of the relative harms from smoking and vaping after reading the statement “vaping is 5% as harmful as smoking” than after reading the statement “vaping is 95% safer than smoking”. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13669877.2020.1749117 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:24:y:2021:i:2:p:198-214

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJRR20

DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2020.1749117

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Risk Research is currently edited by Bryan MacGregor

More articles in Journal of Risk Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().