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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

April L. Brubach, BS, The MayaTech Corporation, 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 900, Silver Spring, MD 20910, 301-587-1600, abrubach@mayatech.com and Erik Augustson, PhD, Tobacco Control Research Branch, National Cancer Institute, Executive Plaza North, Room 4039B, 6130 Executive Blvd. MSC 7337, Bethesda, MD 20892-7337.

Tobacco inflects a deadly toll on African Americans. Approximately 45,000 African Americans die each year from a smoking-related disease. African American men are 50 percent more likely to develop lung cancer than white men, and once ill with cancer of the lung or bronchus, African American men have a higher rate of death than white men. Quitting has been problematic for this population –- prevalence of cessation is higher among whites (50.5 percent) than among African Americans (35.4 percent). The public health community has a responsibility to address African American health disparities related to smoking. With science-based recommendations from the field for large media campaigns to address smoking prevalence, data must inform the delivery of the messages. Crafting messages that resonate with African American smokers is an important step in the process of utilizing mass media to market tobacco prevention and cessation. Also of importance, is the need for social marketers to be aware of the rate of media channel usage by the target population. The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), developed and administered by the National Cancer Institute, is uniquely situated to fill this role. HINTS data provide a unique opportunity to perform secondary data analysis in order to investigate media exposure patterns of African Americans in concert with their smoking behavior which can help inform countermarketing campaigns aimed at lower prevalence rates and increasing quitting for this population.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participant (learner) in this session will be able to

• Identify the mass media channels that African American smokers have the most exposure to.
• Discuss the smoking-related health disparities that African American smokers face.
• Develop an understanding of the available research data collected by the National Cancer Institute's Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS).

Keywords: African American, Media Campaigns

Related Web page: cancercontrol.cancer.gov:0/hints/questions.jsp

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered