%0 Journal Article
%T Smoking Selfies: Using Instagram to Explore Young Women¡¯s Smoking Behaviors
%A Daniel K. Cortese
%A Donna Vallone
%A Elizabeth Hair
%A Glen Szczypka
%A Sherry Emery
%A Shuai Wang
%J Social Media + Society
%@ 2056-3051
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/2056305118790762
%X Our research provides social scientists with areas of inquiry in tobacco-related health disparities in young adult women and opportunities for intervention, as Instagram may be a powerful tool for the public health surveillance of smoking behavior and social norms among young women. Social media has fundamentally changed how to engage with health-related information. Researchers increasingly turn to social media platforms for public health surveillance. Instagram currently is one of the fastest growing social networks with over 53% of young adults (aged 18-29) using the platform and young adult women comprise a significant user base. We conducted a content analysis of a sample of smoking imagery drawn from Instagram¡¯s public Application Programming Interface (API). From August 2014 to July 2015, 18 popular tobacco- and e-cigarette-related text tags were used to collect 2.3£¿million image posts. Trained undergraduate coders (aged 21-29) coded 8,000 images (r£¿=£¿.91) by type of artifact, branding, number of persons, gender, age, ethnicity, and the presence of smoke. Approximately 71.5% of images were tobacco-relevant and informed our research. Images of cigarettes were the most popular (49%), followed by e-cigarettes (32.1%). ¡°Selfies while smoking¡± was the dominant form of portrait expression, with 61.4% of images containing only one person, and of those, 65.7% contained images of women. The most common selfie was women engaged in ¡°smoke play¡± (62.4%) that the viewer could interpret as ¡°cool.¡± These ¡°cool¡± images may counteract public health efforts to denormalize smoking, and young women are bearing the brunt of this under-the-radar tobacco advertising. Social media further normalizes tobacco use because positive images and brand messaging are easily seen and shared, and also operates as unpaid advertising on image-based platforms like Instagram. These findings portend a dangerous trend for young women in the absence of effective public health intervention strategies
%K tobacco
%K smoking
%K vaping
%K e-cigarettes
%K young adult
%K women
%K Instagram
%K selfie
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305118790762