HPRC Researcher Receives Grant to Study Social Media and Vaping

Erin Vogel, PhD, a researcher at the TSET Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC), was awarded a five-year K01 grant worth $911,498 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health to support her career development and research. Dr. Vogel’s research focuses on how digital social environments, particularly social media, affect adolescents’ and young adults’ nicotine and tobacco use, other substance use, and mental health.

Nicotine vaping, also known as e-cigarette use, among adolescents and young adults threatens to addict a new generation to nicotine. In 2019, a quarter of young adults in the U.S. aged 18-20 reported recently vaping nicotine. At the same time, social media has become a nearly universal part of young adults’ social lives. Research has shown that young adults who use social media intensely are more likely to vape nicotine than their peers. Additionally, intense social media use appears to contribute to young adults’ increased mental health symptoms, which are also linked to nicotine and tobacco product use.

The primary goal of Dr. Vogel’s grant is to understand how the social media use of young adults (aged 18-25) affects their nicotine vaping and to identify intervention targets to reduce social media’s impact on nicotine vaping. Her research will examine possible reasons for the link between social media use and nicotine vaping. She will also conduct focus groups with young adults who vape to learn more about how social media use affects them and to hear their opinions about possible intervention strategies.

Dr. Vogel was recruited from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and began work in August 2022 at the HPRC, a part of the NCI-Designated Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She will be mentored by Dr. Amy Cohn, a senior faculty researcher at the HPRC. This grant funding will provide support for Dr. Vogel's development as an independent research investigator with expertise in digital and behavioral health.

This research is primarily supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health, under Award Number K01DA055073, with additional support from the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust Grant R23-02. The content is solely the responsibility of the research team and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.