Secrets to Sustainable Research from the Eastern Virginia Medical School
Since 2002, VFHY has awarded grants to universities across Virginia, funding valuable research into youth tobacco use prevention and supporting more than forty projects to date.
Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) has utilized VFHY funding to research vaping prevention since 2015. Over three consecutive grant cycles, the EVMS research team has tried multiple approaches to preventing youth e-cigarette use, and they have learned three vital lessons in the process:
Embrace change
EVMS’s Rethink Vape campaign began in 2015 with the goal of communicating the risks associated with vaping nicotine to teenagers. After developing an effective slate of messaging, EVMS Principal Investigator (PI) Kelli England and her team launched the Rethink Vape campaign, which included a website, a social media presence, and ad spots on popular websites like YouTube.
In 2018, with their second round of funding from VFHY, EVMS tried a new approach. This project was aimed at physicians and other healthcare professionals, aiming to give them efficient and actionable advice for talking about vaping with youth.
With the third grant cycle in 2021, the project entered its current iteration. This time, the team focused on finding an efficient way to share resources with youth-serving professionals such as guidance counselors and school nurses. They drew data from the Virginia Youth Survey and consulted a task force of youth-serving professionals to develop a toolkit, tentatively called Assessing Vaping Exposure Risk for Teens (AVERT).
“Every time [the research team does] something, they find the gaps and try to address them. That’s been the progression of the grants, looking for things that aren’t there and looking for what they can do to fill them in for the community,” said Paul Harrell, associate professor at EVMS and current PI on the research team.
Listen to youth
Early in the development of Rethink Vape, the research team noticed a problem with the initial slate of messages they developed. Although adults liked them, they did not resonate with the project’s target audience: teenagers. The team had to go back to the drawing board, develop a new set of messages, and test it with Virginia youth to see what would land.
This revision process taught the team another lesson: Don’t make assumptions about what your target audience needs or already knows. The Rethink Vape project started in 2015, shortly before Juul debuted and the US e-cigarette market exploded. The research team assumed their audience was more familiar with vaping than they really were, and it took a lot of trial-and-error to get the messaging just right.
Be open-minded
EVMS has been able to maintain such a long and successful research project because the research team possesses an important trait: humility. The program’s numerous changes – from adjusting the messaging to starting fresh on a new project with each grant cycle – were easy to weather because of the research team’s adaptability.
“[The] team was humble enough to be willing to learn. They’re willing to admit that they don’t know something and figure it out,” said research assistant Ann Edwards.
Feeling inspired to pursue a research project of your own?
Consider applying for a VFHY research grant. Following a competitive application project, grants of up to $150,000 per year for 1-3 years are awarded to fund research projects studying youth tobacco use prevention.
