Week 2: Finishing the Survey and Beginning Research

Hey, everyone! Welcome back to my Senior Project blog! Here’s what I’ve done since last time: edited my surveys, reached out to local organizations, and begun researching the narratives that the tobacco industry has pushed to people in the past.

Editing My Surveys:

By my last blog post, I had finished the first draft of my survey. With the help of my internal and external advisors, I have been able to refine it to make the questions clearer, make the survey easier for the respondent to read, and ensure that there is a logical flow that the respondent can follow as they take the survey. Now, my survey is completed and I’m ready to send them out!

Reaching Out to Organizations:

I have begun reaching out to schools, stores, libraries, and community centers through email. I’ve been asking if I can distribute my survey in person or whether they can distribute my survey online. After reaching out the first time, I had to follow up with many people, and I plan to call them soon. My external advisor will also help distribute my survey online through connections with advocacy groups throughout Alameda County. While my survey can be answered by anyone, I hope to get some responses from active tobacco product users and reach a good amount of people.

Researching Past Narratives:

In the past, the tobacco industry spread a lot of false narratives about tobacco products being good for users. I believe researching these narratives is very important to my project because it can help me determine how these ideas have been circulated throughout the years and how I can counter these narratives through the informational campaigns I will be creating later on in my project.

It started in the 1930s when it was not known that smoking cigarettes was harmful to health. Many people noticed that cigarettes caused throat irritation, but the tobacco industry would try to claim that their specific cigarettes caused less irritation. Many companies would sponsor doctors, give them free cigarettes, or mislead them in order to claim that the doctors supported their products. Finally, around the 1950’s, there was evidence that cigarettes were harmful to health and the industry could no longer claim that doctors supported smoking. However, the tobacco industry continued to deny this evidence, and until 1998 they told cigarette users that they were doing their own research to determine if cigarettes were actually harmful. While these events might have happened a long time ago, it shows that the tobacco industry has been trying to mislead people to get them to use their products.

In more recent times, the tobacco industry has promoted the idea that tobacco products have a positive impact on mental health. People who have mental health and substance use disorders make up 40% of cigarette smokers, and the tobacco industry has tried to capitalize off of that. In the past, they have given free cigarettes to psychiatric facilities and mental health groups. Additionally, the industry has funded research to claim that people with mental disorders use nicotine to help with their mental health, and they have interfered in other research by funding researchers and influencing the questions asked in order to get favorable answers. The industry spreads this idea that tobacco products have beneficial mental health impacts through their ads, where they try to link relaxation and tobacco product usage. Research has been done to show that the advertisements that the industry has spread have a large impact on an individual’s decision to use tobacco products. With all the research I have done, I plan to address these narratives spread by the industry and counter them with research showing the true mental health impacts of tobacco product usage.

I’m happy to have learnt so much this week and I’m excited to see what happens with my survey. I’m going to continue my research about past narratives from the tobacco industry, and next week I will be looking at past data showing trends of tobacco product usage and mental health. It was great learning about this incredible history, and I can’t wait to see how it has had an impact on our present. Thanks for reading!

Sources:

https://www.history.com/news/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470496/

https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/targeted-communities/how-tobacco-companies-linked-cigarettes-and-mental-health

https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/m19_7.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376000/