Decoding Vaping: Empowering Youth through Media Literacy Based E-Cigarette Educational Program

E-cigarette industry's marketing and social media efforts have promoted adolescent vaping. We developed and pilot-tested an anti-vaping media literary program - MediaSense. In addition to employing the Community-Based Participatory Research approach for program development, we applied a prospective, interventional, and single-arm design to assess the impact of MediaSense among students from five middle and high schools. Data were collected through REDCap surveys administered before and after the intervention. We performed generalized linear mixed models and median analysis to evaluate changes in vaping media literacy (i.e., Authors and Audiences [vAA], Messages and Meanings [vMM], and Representation and Reality [vRR]), knowledge, harm perception, and susceptibility to e-cigarette use before and after the intervention. A total of 384 students aged 11-18 years completed the pre-post survey assessment. After the intervention, students exhibited significantly improved vaping media literacy across all three domains (vAA,fold change [FC]=150%, p