UK Researcher’s Study of CRUSH Anti-Smoking Campaign Makes Top LGBT News
An anti-smoking campaign targeting members of the LGBT community and evaluated by University of Kentucky College of Nursing researcher Amanda Fallin was recently cited as a Huffington Post “LGBT Wellness Story of the Week.”
The Huffington Post Gay Voices article appearing July 18 mentions results of a study testing the impact of CRUSH, a social branding campaign designed to reduce smoking rates in LGBT adults. According to the data, members of the LGBT community are more likely to smoke than their heterosexual counterparts. CRUSH is a bar-based intervention using aspirational branding, social events and targeted media to reduce the rates of smoking in this highly susceptible population. The study, titled "Social Branding to Decrease Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Young Adult Smoking," was published in the August issue of Nicotine and Tobacco Research, the scholarly journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.
More than 2,300 cross-sectional surveys measuring bar patrons' exposure to the CRUSH campaign were collected from Las Vegas bars and nightclubs two times and two years apart. More than half (53 percent) of respondents reported exposure to CRUSH, 60 percent said they “liked” the campaign and 86 percent understood the intent of the smoke-free campaign. Among participants who understood the purpose of the campaign, those with the highest level of exposure to the campaign correlated with a 37 to 48 percent decrease in odds for current smoking. The study also found a decrease in smoking rates between the first and second year of data collection.
Fallin serves as assistant research professor in the University of Kentucky College of Nursing. Her work focuses on tobacco control policy in disparate populations. She and research colleagues published the results of study in the August edition of Nicotine Tobacco Research.
