The what is and why bother with a critical public health (19)

So this is the context in which our project is situated. In our study we were interested in examining young vapers’ perspectives on vaping—arguably a knowledge that is quite subjugated in the e-cigarette debate. A lot of assumptions operate in the literature about why youth were adopting vaping, and whether vaping was reglamorizing smoking and threatening successful denormalization efforts. And these assumptions were the ones that we wanted to investigate by examining the perspectives of youth, so that we could query the status quo operating within the tobacco field.

For our study, we interviewed 52 young people between the ages of 15 and 25, to examine the meanings, roles, and practices of nicotine and tobacco use for youth and young adults. All participants had vaped at some point in the past, and 33 participants were currently vaping at the time of the interview.