PUBH6012 Efficacy Of Social Media Intervention In Tobacco Abuse Assessment 1 Answer

Answer :

Efficacy of social media intervention in the tobacco abuseAbstract

Background: Tobacco in the current era has become a poison in the society. It has reached a level where it can be safely assumed and proved that tobacco has reached a state of abuse within the society. This tobacco obsession has led a large number of the population to suffer from quite a number of medical condition and diseases such as hyper tension, artery blockage, COPD and cancer. The major parts of population who are between the ages of 25-32 years are the moist affected. On this context it should be noted that the number of the affected males are higher than that of the females.

Method: Document analysis appraoch has been taken to achieve the aims of research. Four policy documents are used for document analysis. Policy analysis is a significant task which can help in assessing the outputs and the benefits that the guidelines or strategies can provide for better health outcomes of the people. 

Results: The mass media channels should be considered for tobacco prevention. These mass media channels are televisions, newspapers, fliers, pamphlets, social media apps and platforms such as Facebook, YouTube etc. Our research had shown that social media can be used to direct a message to a particular demographic section.

Conclusion: In this aspect, use of social media can be extremely valuable and tools like Facebook advertising are going to be the key on the implementation of the awareness programs.

Key words: Health policies, Tobacco Preventions, Social Media

Background

The main aim of this project was to ensure that every youth of Australia knows the ill effects of tobacco and how it affects and restricts a healthy lifestyle. The research aims at finding out how social media interventions towards tobacco restrictions perform and to figure out their effectiveness and outcomes. The research has given grounds to some of the serious questions that pops up like the usefulness and effectiveness of using social media towards reducing tobacco abuse and is they enough or if something more is needed. The research also goes through the aspects of the applications that can be used to carry out the social media interventions. The research also takes into account past work that has been done on this topic. 

The literature review goes through topics that include the health issues that the youths and majority of the populations go through due to use of tobacco, the exposure to smoking both active and passive, how social media affects the youth and how it can be used to better guide and educate the youth about these factors and problems. Past and ongoing researches that focus on the effect of mass media and youth and how effective it is in conveying a particular message to a large part of a specific age group or demographic. 

The research uses a particular methodology of a grounded action approach to perform the required action. Along with it a quantitative approach has also been used. Specific and carefully chosen samples have been used to provide the literature reviews for the research. Most of the literatures have been gathered from online sources and the advantages of using such multiple literatures is that it is more reliable and more effective. Most of the data that has been used and collected for the purpose of the research has been collected from the Google scholar. Also unbiased researches are used for better clarity and efficiency. The expected outcome of the research is increasing the awareness and reduction of risks and health factors that centres around tobacco consumption and to eliminate and reduce tobacco abuse. 

It is no surprise that the use of tobacco kills more than eight million people every year. When more than seven million deaths are the direct result of the consumption of tobacco, more than one million die as the result of passive-smoking. The statistics is supplied none other than WHO (World Health Organization) and published in July 2019. Our surprises do not stop here, it rather starts its journey from here and sustains the same trend while more and more such data comes up below. The importance of health, seems to have been forgotten long back. The statistics presented by WHO are likely to get terrible with the passing of time if the issue remain unchecked. The youth of today receives a much early exposure than their predecessors and it is quite feasible to conclude that the impact of tobacco in public-health is going to be more shocking. We know that various governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) show their commitment to eradicate the problem of tobacco use in the society. UNICEF recommends a set of measures to overcome the use of tobacco.

Yet, it is clear that all such efforts fail to attain the desired goal of diminishing the use of tobacco. A lot more efforts are yet to be undertaken to abolish the tobacco abuse. Previously, people were busy in discovering ways, more practical than theoretical mumbo jumbo, to reduce the use of tobacco. With the passing of time when we have enough of data in this regard and the harmful impact tobacco causes to human health, we discover that the problem is not as much as deep-rooted in the discovery of measures of reducing tobacco use than in the use of the data to dissuade humanity from the use of it. The relentless efforts, after a long time found something more hopeful than ever before.

Methods:

The main aim of this study is to identify the methods which can help in analyzing the policies related to prevention of the health issues related to tobacco in Australia. Some of the social determinants for the solution of health issues due to tobacco will be identified and analysis will be made based on the frameworks or objectives as depicted in the policies.

Document analysis:

The analysis will be made on the documents of the health policies related to the prevention of intake of tobacco for the people of Australia. The policy documents are extremely valuable and can help in understanding the steps that the Government of Australia and WHO are taking for reducing the impact of tobacco products in the country (White et al., 2015). 

Selection of the policies:

The policies that would be selected for the analysis would be based on the recent strategies and the framework that the Government of Australia and WHO have implemented in the recent years. Four policies have been selected for the purpose of analysis. These are: Australia’s National Tobacco Strategy, WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, National Preventative Health Strategy and National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health. Therefore; three of these policies are related to the Government of Australia and the other policy is related to WHO. The policies that have been selected are up to date and have been reviewed well before selecting them. It has been also ensured that the selected policies are aligned with the main objectives of this research. This means these policies are related to the strategies of tobacco control and the frameworks that are associated with it. Therefore; by analyzing the documents of the policies, it would be possible to assess the strategies implemented by the health department of Australia till now and the changes or the additions that can be implemented in the existing policy by the Government.

Table 1: Selected Policies

Coding framework:

Use of coding is going to be important in the aspect of collecting and analyzing the qualitative data for this research (Stuckey, 2015). The coding will be based on the keywords that will be taken from the four policies. The data will be collected based on the codes and further, the analysis will be also done with the use of the primary data. The data will be collected based on themes and this is going to be extremely effective for analyzing the themes behind the respective policies. The main focus of collecting the primary data will be social media. In this process, survey will be conducted with 25 users of social media based in Australia. Their perception on the policies regarding reduction in the intake of tobacco products will be collected. This would help in assessing the effectiveness of the policy for the people. Due to the fact that the budget and time for the research is limited, therefore; the focus will be on collecting limited primary data. However; importance will be also given on collecting the quality amount of data. 

In case of using the coding, some categories will be divided and those categories will be used as the keywords. Therefore; a theme for the respective policy will be used and will help in assessing the detailed overview of the policies. The main focus thus will be assess about how social media can be utilized for implementing the policies and how the social media can be used as the effective channel through which the promotion or marketing campaign can be conducted regarding the implementation of the policies (Jawad et al., 2015). The categories that will be used will include the the tobacco control policies, increase of the price of the tobacco products, reduction measures of supply side and demand sides of the tobacco products and ant-smoking campaign through social media. These categories can be extremely effective and the data regarding these policies would be useful on analyzing the impact of the social media on the categories. This means the analysis will be on how social media can be utilized for implementing these categories for tobacco control. Therefore; coding will be made based on the categories. The coding structure would define the main themes that would be necessary to be utilized for understanding the impact of the policies and the benefits that the policies can provide in the process controlling and reducing the intake of tobacco products by the people of Australia. It would be important to develop the objectives for the analysis of the qualitative data. Due to the fact that tobacco consumption is higher in case of the indigenous community of people of Australia, therefore; it would be important to assess the social determinants that drive them to smoke tobacco (Gould et al., 2015). This would be thus used as the main source code and then the sub-categories of the codes will be developed. The sub-categories will be derived from the main source codes.

Coding:

The coding will be developed in accordance to the categories that can be used for promoting in the social media. Therefore; the categories and sub-categories of the codes have been developed based on the factors that would be essential for using social media for this purpose. Different coding options will be developed which would help in analyzing the data with details. The main codes and their sub-categories are demonstrated in the below table.

Table 2: Main codes

From the coding and the sub-categories of the coding, it can be analyzed that the categories have been divided according to the themes. Therefore; it would be possible to analyze each of the codes. Data will be extracted from the four policy documents and the data will be based on how the strategies can be effective if implemented well. Further, the perceptions of the participants of the primary resources will be also considered and will help in analyzing the effectiveness of the strategies. It can be seen that the code of major issues faced by youth had been divided into sub-categories. These codes thus will be helpful on understanding the impact and benefits of the policies. This would further help in developing the strategies for utilizing social media. Then, the effectiveness of the policy as developed by the health department of Australia will be assessed by comparing with the policy as developed by WHO. Therefore; assessment and comparison will be the two sub-categories that would be effective. The policies that have been undertaken for the research will be analyzed with three sub-categories. Lastly, for identifying the suitable strategies for the utilization of social media, 4 codes have been developed.  This would also contain the assessment about the effectiveness of social media on making the people aware about the different policies.

The main issues and the target audience:

People already know the health issues, which occur due to the consumption of tobacco. Despite of the reduction on the percentage of smokers in Australia, the number of smokers is still on the higher side. Along with this, it has been also identified that the indigenous people comprise of the most number of smokers in Australia. Mostly the youths are involved in smoking tobacco (McCallum et al., 2017). And, it is also found that numerous health issues are faced by youth. These diseases are Hypertension, Artery blockage,COPD and cancer.

            Therefore; the target audience for the campaign on control of tobacco will be the youths between 18-30 years of age. Majority of the target audience will involve the youths of the indigenous community of the country. Therefore; through the analysis of the policies of control of tobacco consumption, these target audiences will be connected through social media. The codes that have been developed are thus based on the analysis about the benefits that the policies can provide for the positive health outcomes of these youths. However; the youths of non-indigenous community of the country will be also considered. The reason is that the control needs to be implemented for the whole country and the communities not just some specific communities of people of the country. The impact of smoking on the health of these people will be also assessed through the analysis of the policy documents. 

Analysis of the codes and sub-codes:

Major issues faced by youth:

The code is based on the steps that would be necessary to be implemented for controlling the consumption of tobacco. From the document of the Australia’s National Tobacco Strategy, it has been identified that youth is primarly affected by tobacco consumptions and suffer from many health issues in young age. Health issues among young people add burden on national healthcare system and reduce overall productivity. Through the policy, it is clear that the Government of Australia is focused on reducing the percentage of the adults who intake tobacco from 19.1% to 10% ("Department of Health | National Tobacco Strategy", 2019). The focus is also on reducing the percentage of smokers of the indigenous community of people of the country which is on the higher side. The benefits could come from the policy of the National Preventative Health Strategy in which the focus has been given on educating the young people on controlling their smoking habits ("Department of Health | National Preventive Health Strategy", 2019). On the other hand, for the policy of WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, importance of creating public awareness specifically for youth on the impact of smoking is also mentioned. WHO framework convention on Tobacco control also focuses on training and educational programs for youth so that they can be awared about severe health problems by youth due to tobacco consumption. Therefore; the health issues for both indigenous and non-indigenous people can be equally assessed from the policies. In this aspect, the code have been analysed to select best policy to create the awareness among youth.

Factors helping in Tobacco Control

Tobacco consumption is an addiction that is not easy to give up. Hence, it is necessary to analyse the factors, which trigger tobacco consumption. Hence, analysis of all four policies under this code will be strong foundation to select best policy to achieve objective of this research. The effectiveness of the policies can be estimated by controlling of these factors. Government of Australia sets goal on reducing the percentage of the adults of Australia who are involved in smoking to 10% within the next 10 years. National Partnership agreement on preventive health policy’s action plans revolves around to make partnership with food suppliers  to limit the supply of tobacco. Apart from this, said policy also relies on heavy use of social media to create awareness to limit the consumption of tobacco ("National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health - Policies - Promote and practice - Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet", 2019). If compared with the policy of WHO, education and communication with the people has been given importance. Therefore; the policy of the National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health can be identified as efficient one and meet with the code 2(Factors helping in tobacco control).  The suitability of policies can be further analyzed through the impact that the policies can provide for the target audiences that have been identified.

Government Initiatives

           Four policies have been identified and thus, all the policies are aligned in accordance with initiative taken by government for controlling the intake of tobacco. All four policies are analyzed in context of anti tobacco campaign, decreasing alcohol promotions and partnership with food and nutrition departments. The policy of Australia’s National Tobacco Strategy can be considered as apt for anti tobacco campaign through utilization of social media. This is due to the fact that it focuses on creating awareness among the target people so that they can be educated about the harmful effects of consuming tobacco ("Department of Health | National Tobacco Strategy", 2019). Even, the policy of National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health can be also considered as effective as it is aligned with the above-mentioned policy ("National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health - Policies - Promote and practice - Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet", 2019). The National Preventative Health Strategy focuses on conducting the digital marketing campaign and the website of the department also has the promotional videos which are based on creating awareness among the people on quitting smoking ("Smoking and tobacco", 2019). The National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health also pays attention to collaboration with food suppliers. The code is well aligned with the requirements of analyzing the policies for government initiative for utilizing social media.

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Preventive Health Strategy

          The various strategies to prevent tobacco consumption have been considered as the code. Reducing sale of tobacco, using social media/mass for awareness and prevention of chain smoking are analyzed under this code. The contents of the social media are going to extremely important for defining the success of the objectives that have been defined. The tobacco control framework of WHO also defined that the promotion of any tobacco related products on social media needs to be strictly prohibited and the people responsible for promoting need to be punished ("WHO | About the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control", 2019). Therefore; the strategy can be regarding the development of the policy on controlling the promotion of tobacco products among the social media pages of Australia. The promotional strategy thus helps in developing the contents on creating awareness among the users of social media. 

Table 4: Phases of code

Therefore; from the table, it can be analyzed the behavioral changes among the smokers is going to be extremely important. In this aspect, the behavioral changes can be implemented if proper measures are implemented for educating these people. Therefore; social media can be used as the effective tool by which the awareness can be created effectively. 

Strengths and limitations:

The strength of this method can be considered from the fact that the research has undertaken some of the key policies, which are focused on the reduction on the rate of smoking and on the steps, which can help in controlling the increase of smokers. There have been also discussions about the issues faced by the indigenous people of Australia due to the increasing percentage of smokers. The policy documents thus have been effective enough to analyze the benefits of the strategies that could be implemented. The limitations of the method can be in the aspect of the limited amount of data that have been collected. For this, the number of codes has been less as well. Along with this, another limitation can be identified as the limited number of target people that has been considered for the research.

Discussions:

Through the analysis of the codes and the policies, it can be stated that a majority number of smokers can be benefited if social media is considered for creating awareness. Moreover; it has been also analyzed that all the policies have focused on creating the awareness among the people and the people of the country have considered this as one of the effective strategies, which can help the Government to control consumption of tobacco. It has been also identified that the youths constitute the significant numbers of smokers both from the communities of indigenous and non-indigenous people of the country. Along with this, youths comprise of the largest section of users of social media. Social media can be also considered as the option through which the users can be made aware of the new policies or changes in the policies. For example, if the prices of the tobacco products increase, then the users of social media can be made aware about the importance of increasing the prices. This would also help in creating a positive impact on the behavior of the smokers. Videos on the anti-smoking campaign can be extremely effective and those videos need to be promoted through the social media (Ulna et al., 2016). The four policies that have been identified thus can be extremely useful and the it can be also analyzed that the health department of Australia can consider the articles stated in the framework of WHO for enhancing the quality of their policies on anti-smoking. 

    In the course of identifying the problems, the major health issues for the youths have been identified. The issues are related to the health problems due to intake of tobacco. In this aspect, the Government of Australia needs to take the prevention initiatives along with developing the strategies to control on the increase of smokers. Therefore; it would be important to identify the factors, which can help in controlling the use of tobacco. The policy regarding the National Tobacco Strategies focuses on the control of tobacco usage by reducing the affordability of the availability of tobacco and by increasing the number of places where smoking would be prohibited ("Department of Health | National Tobacco Strategy", 2019). The Preventive Health Strategy has been based implementing plans that could help in preventing the spread of the sales of tobacco in the country on an immediate basis. The Government of Australia can take initiative with WHO to develop the strategies on tobacco control in the country. This would be useful while developing the plans on utilizing social media for creating awareness among the youth population of the country.

The control policies on the usage of tobacco and sales of the products in the country would be extremely important and would be essential for reduction the sales. In this aspect, the preventive measures would be extremely essential and would help in educating the youths of the country by implementing an enhanced learning policy Chauhan & Sharma, 2017). Therefore; the factors are required to be identified with efficiency along with implementing those factors successfully in the campaign to be conducted through social media.

Conclusions:

From the research, it has been analyzed that the control frameworks of the Government on anti-smoking can be effective if implemented with perfection. The reason is that the strategies also need to be aligned with the action plan for implementation. Therefore; through this research paper, the policies have been considered and their main intention has been also identified through the methodology that has been applied.