Comparing social norms for adolescent smoking and vaping behaviours using game theory based experiments and self-reports: insights from the MECHANISMS Study
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Many adolescent smoking prevention programs target social norms, typically evaluated with self-report, susceptible to social desirability bias. An alternative approach with limited application in public health is to use experimental norms elicitation methods.<br/><br/>Methods: Using the Mechanisms of Networks and Norms Influence on Smoking in Schools (MECHANISMS) study baseline data, from 12–13 year old school pupils (n=1656) in Northern Ireland and Bogotá, we compare two methods of measuring injunctive and descriptive smoking/ vaping norms. These include: (1) incentivized experiments, eliciting norms using monetary payments; (2) self-report scales. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) examined whether the methods measured the same construct. Paths from exposures (country, sex) to norms, and associations of norms with smoking behaviour/intentions were inspected in structural models.<br/><br/>Results: Second-order CFA showed latent variables representing experimental and survey norms measurements were measuring the same underlying construct of anti-smoking/vaping norms. Adding covariates into structural models showed significant paths from country to norms (second-order anti-smoking/vaping norms latent variable: standardized factor loading [β]=0.30, standard error [SE]=0.09, p < 0.001), and associations of norms with self-reported anti-smoking behaviour (β = 0.40, SE = 0.04,p < 0.001), anti-smoking intentions (β = 0.42, SE = 0.06, p < 0.001), and objectively measured smoking behaviour (β = −0.20, SE = 0.06, p = 0.001).Conclusions and implications: We provide evidence for the construct validity of behavioural economic methods of eliciting adolescents moking/vaping norms. These methods seem to index the same underlying phenomena as commonly-used self-report scales. Our research uses innovative, transdisciplinary insights from game theory about norms elicitation that will have future relevance for other health-related behaviours.<br/><br/>
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it