PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Asian Americans (AAs) are the fastest growing racial group in the US and are comprised of over 40 diverse
cultural groups. Although the prevalence of smoking across AA populations is about half of the national
average, disaggregated data reveals a different picture: males of Vietnamese (24.4%), Korean (19.3%), and
Filipino Americans (20.6%) report high smoking prevalence, up to two times higher than other Asian ethnic
subgroups such as Chinese or Asian Indian males. Such substantial disparity requires new approaches.
Health communication is an effective way to enhance population health outcomes, including tobacco use.
Targeted health communication, developing messages that reflect unique characteristics of a particular
subpopulation, can be a key strategy to address tobacco-related health disparity among AA smokers. The
proposed research aims to assess the effectiveness of targeting strategies informed by cultural sensitivity
theory: deep (e.g., content reflecting Asian cultural values) and surface structure (e.g., featuring Asian models)
targeting in anti-smoking messages. The long-term goal of this research program is to inform effective and
efficient intervention development to enhance public health outcomes and promote health equity among
culturally diverse groups, including Asian Americans and Latinx populations. The objective will be addressed in
two aims: (1) Examine the acceptability of culturally targeted anti-smoking messages among Korean,
Vietnamese, and Filipino American smokers using in-depth interviews; (2) assess the effectiveness of surface
and deep structure targeting strategies among Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino American smokers using an
experiment. The proposed research will use four types of anti-smoking messages: a) deep and surface
structure targeted; b) deep structure only targeted; c) surface structure only targeted; and d) non-targeted
messages. Study 1 will use in-depth interviews to examine how AA smokers respond to messages with
different targeting strategies. Study 2 will use 2X2 between-subject online experiment to assess the
effectiveness of deep and surface-structure targeting strategies by observing how outcome variables differ
across the conditions. We will examine the main and interaction effects of the two targeting strategies, as well
as their relative effectiveness. The proposed research is innovative because this is one of the first studies to
apply analytical approach based on message effects theories to systematically manipulate specific message
components to assess the effects of various targeting strategies for AAs, including their relative effectiveness.
Also, this study is the first to evaluate message effects using a volumetric choice experiment that estimates
individual-level price elasticity and cigarette demand, in addition to other self-reported measurements.
