Adolescent Vaping: Revisiting Developmental Perspectives on Adolescent Substance Use in the Digital Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every wave of preferred substance use in adolescence serves similar developmental functions. The recent explosion among adolescents of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), popularly known as vaping, offers an opportunity to revisit models of the role of substance use in adolescent development. Social media's rise alongside that of ENDS distinguishes this recent phenomenon from previous historical waves of substance abuse: Vaping was and remains highly integrated into the digital culture, situating social media as a unique window into the adolescent users' subjective experience. To that end, we employ analyses of vaping manifestations within adolescent social media to complement clinical case material. We position adolescent vaping as an action-oriented facilitation of externalization, individuation, and challenge to authority that can precipitate adolescent-adult enactments. We propose that this use-reinforcing developmental function complements other biological and social properties of ENDS to cement its position within contemporary adolescent culture. We suggest that the evolution of adolescents' preferred devices from pens to USB-like devices to round pastel Elf Bar types and new wave cannabis products is driven by this trend's successive approximation to satisfaction of an adolescent developmental demand. While legal and limit-setting efforts to reduce adolescent vaping have been partially successful, we offer this updated developmental model to complement existing public health efforts in reducing adolescent ENDS use through an understanding and integration of its developmental meanings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".