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The number of colleges and universities with smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies has been increasing. The effects of campus smoking policies on overall sentiment, particularly among young adult populations, are more difficult to assess owing to the changing tobacco and e-cigarette product landscape and differential attitudes toward policy implementation and enforcement.
The goal of the study was to retrospectively assess the campus climate toward tobacco use by comparing tweets from California universities with and those without smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies.
Geolocated Twitter posts from 2015 were collected using the Twitter public application programming interface in combination with cloud computing services on Amazon Web Services. Posts were filtered for tobacco products and behavior-related keywords. A total of 42,877,339 posts were collected from 2015, with 2837 originating from a University of California or California State University system campus, and 758 of these manually verified as being about smoking. Chi-square tests were conducted to determine if there were significant differences in tweet user sentiments between campuses that were smoke- or tobacco-free (all University of California campuses and California State University, Fullerton) compared to those that were not. A separate content analysis of tweets included in chi-square tests was conducted to identify major themes by campus smoking policy status.
The percentage of positive sentiment tweets toward tobacco use was higher on campuses without a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy than on campuses with a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy (76.7% vs 66.4%,
Our study introduces preliminary data suggesting that campus smoke- and tobacco-free policies are associated with a reduction in positive sentiment toward smoking. However, continued expressions and intentions to smoke and reports of one’s own smoking among Twitter users suggest a need for more research to better understand the dynamics between implementation of smoke- and tobacco-free policies and resulting tobacco behavioral sentiment.
The number of colleges and universities with smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies has been increasing [
The effects of campus smoking policies on overall sentiment, particularly among young adults, are more difficult to assess given the changing tobacco and e-cigarette product landscape and differential attitudes toward policy implementation and enforcement. Geolocating social media posts to specific spatiotemporal areas allows for comparison of in situ smoking-related attitudes and behaviors, including between campuses with and without smoke- or tobacco-free campuses. Hence, geolocation information available from publicly available social media Twitter posts represents an opportunity to garner infoveillance-generated insights retrospective to the policy implementation periods.
Public 4-year universities in California provide a unique comparison for assessing tobacco-related attitudes and behaviors during policy implementation. The state has two public 4-year university systems, the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU). As of January 2014, a systemwide tobacco-free policy went into effect on all UC campuses prohibiting tobacco use, including e-cigarettes, on campus grounds [
Geolocated Twitter posts from 2015, a year after which the UC system had enacted its systemwide tobacco-free policy and prior to enactment in the CSU system, were used to conduct a retrospective analysis of smoking-themed tweets geofenced from UC and CSU campuses (one CSU campus—Fullerton—enacted its own smokefree policy effective August 2013). Data collection was conducted using the Twitter public application programming interface in combination with cloud computing services on Amazon Web Services. Data were filtered for messages that included geospatial coordinates enabled by users. These data were collected in JSON format and stored in a relational database, with information on the date and time of the post, hyperlink to the original tweet, text of the tweet, and geospatial coordinates.
Posts were selected for further analysis if they included any of the following keywords associated with tobacco products and behavior:
Tweets that included these keywords were then further filtered to identify those physically originating (ie, geofenced) from CSU or UC campuses using base maps of these schools available from the Stanford Prevention Research Center [
Human annotators manually assessed posts relating to the study theme corresponding to user-generated tobacco products or related behavior, for face validity. Human annotators were trained in tobacco research and have participated in prior research infoveillance research [
A separate content analysis of tweets with smoking-related sentiment was conducted by the first author to identify central themes [
A total of 42,877,339 posts with smoking-related keywords were collected from 2015, with 2837 originating from a UC or CSU system campus, and 758 of these manually verified as being associated with user-generated smoking behavior discussions. Among Twitter posts for which positive or negative sentiment was identified (396 posts from 286 unique users), 66.4% (n=89) of posts originating from smoke- and tobacco-free campuses had a positive sentiment toward tobacco products compared to 76.7% (n=201) of posts originating from campuses without smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies (
Map depicting geocoding of positive and negative sentiment tweets from California State University (A) and University of California (B) campuses, which had the greatest number of tweets.
Four thematic categories of negative sentiment tweets and 9 thematic categories of positive sentiment tweets emerged from the data (
Thematic categories of smoking-related tweets originating from public 4-year universities by sentiment, California, 2015.
Category | Deidentified examples | |
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Observation of others smoking on campus |
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Smell of cigarettes or smokers |
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Support for smoke- or tobacco-free policy |
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Opinions against smoking |
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Expression of desire to smoke |
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Report of one’s own smoking |
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Intention to smoke |
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Opposition to campus smoking policy |
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General comments about one’s smoking behavior |
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Comments about smoking as general behavior |
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Urging others to smoke |
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Positive opinions about smoking |
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Attraction to people who smoke or environments where smoking occurs |
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aTweet originating from a campus with a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy.
bTweet originating from a campus without a smoke- or tobacco-free campus policy.
Dominant smoking-related themes originating from public 4-year universities by sentiment and campus smoking policy type, California, 2015.
Campus type | Negative sentiment | Positive sentiment |
Campuses with smoke- or tobacco-free policies |
Observations of others smoking on campus (n=11) Smell of cigarettes or smokers (n=8) |
Expressions of desire to smoke (n=22) Reports of one’s own smoking (n=10) Intention to smoke (n=8) |
Campuses without smoke- or tobacco-free policies |
Opinions opposed to smoking (n=10) Observations of others smoking on campus (n=8) Smell of cigarettes or smokers (n=7) |
Expressions of desire to smoke (n=36) Reports of one’s own smoking (n=23) General comments about one’s own smoking behavior (n=18) Comments about smoking as a general behavior (n=18) Intention to smoke (n=14) |
Quantitative analysis of tweets originating from campuses of public 4-year universities in California revealed a significant difference in sentiment toward smoking by campus smoking policy status, with a higher proportion of positive sentiment tweets originating from campuses without smoke- or tobacco-free policies, but an overall high percentage of positive sentiment regardless of campus smoking policy type. Greater positive sentiment may have been driven by more tweets containing general comments about one’s own smoking behavior and comments about smoking as a general behavior and a greater variety in types of positive sentiment tweets.
Negative sentiment toward smoking was identified on both campus types, but universities without a smoke- or tobacco-free policy had much higher numbers of positive sentiment tweets in two categories: general comments about one’s own smoking behavior and comments about smoking as a general behavior. These differences may indicate policy passage and implementation at smoke- and tobacco-free campuses may be associated with less positive sentiment toward smoking, consistent with other studies [
Data collected for this study were limited to Twitter users who enabled geolocation, which may have introduced bias in the volume and types of tweets or Twitter users for whom data were collected. Additionally, this study only reviewed data from a single calendar year to assess differences in sentiment between California universities with and those without smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies, though examining tweets from subsequent years (2016 and 2017) may have yielded additional user sentiment after policy implementation. Another limitation is the constrained contextual information available in some tweets (eg, such as references to “smoking” without mention of a specific product), found mainly among tweets expressing an intention to smoke, which may have referred to marijuana and not tobacco products. We also did not restrict our data set to one tweet per user, though a user expressing negative or positive sentiment may be more likely to have a similar sentiment in other tweets they post. The rationale for this approach included the detection of both second- and first-hand accounts of smoking behavior, which could relate to multiple smoking behavior instances and the possibility that this could lead to possible underestimation of expressed sentiment toward alleged violations of campus smoking bans. Finally, this is an ecological study assessing the relationship between a survey of smoking-related social media posts from college campuses and the policies on those campuses. Associations uncovered in this study may not apply to individuals, and the effect of college policies on sentiment should be further investigated in studies with a breadth of individual participants whose selection is representative of the campus population.
Among Twitter users in California public universities, the overall sentiment toward tobacco products and use is high, although positive sentiment is higher on campuses without smoke- or tobacco-free campus policies. Smoke- and tobacco-free policy initiatives, including implementation, may help reduce positive sentiment toward smoking on college campuses and should be strengthened to maximally increase their impact.
California State University
University of California
This study was partially supported by funds provided by The Regents of the University of California, Tobacco-Related Diseases Research Program (grant T29IP0465). The opinions and conclusions herein are those of the author and not necessarily represent those of The Regents of the University of California or any of its programs.
None declared.