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Category: Project

Description: Negative media portrayals of e-cigarettes may influence beliefs about the relative harm of e-cigarettes compared with conventional cigarettes (‘harm perceptions’), which may in turn influence their use. Data from longitudinal surveys indicate that there is a decreasing trend in the proportion of individuals who perceive e-cigarettes to be less harmful than conventional cigarettes across the UK, Europe, US and Australia. Previous research has found harm perceptions to differ by age, sex and social grade, although the direction of the associations varies by country and year. This study will, for the first time, use a time series approach to estimate how far changes in harm perceptions have been associated with changes in the prevalence of e-cigarette use in England, with and without stratification by age, sex and social grade.