Influence of Flavors on the Propagation of E-Cigarette-Related Information: Social Media Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Modeling the influence of e-cigarette flavors on information propagation could provide quantitative policy decision support concerning smoking initiation and contagion, as well as e-cigarette regulations.

Objective

The objective of this study was to characterize the influence of flavors on e-cigarette-related information propagation on social media.

Methods

We collected a comprehensive dataset of e-cigarette-related discussions from public Pages on Facebook. We identified 11 categories of flavors based on commonly used categorizations. Each post's frequency of being shared served as a proxy measure of information propagation. We evaluated a set of regression models and chose the hurdle negative binomial model to characterize the influence of different flavo

SUBMITTER: Zhou J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5889495 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature