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- Published on: 22 July 2022
- Published on: 22 July 2022
- Published on: 22 July 2022Response to Wang, 'Some discrepancies and limitations'
NOT PEER REVIEWED
We would like to thank Mr. Wang for his feedback on our paper, Indicators of dependence and efforts to quit vaping and smoking among youth in Canada, England and the USA.
With regards to the ‘discrepancies’ in vaping and smoking prevalence between those reported in Table 1 and an earlier publication [1], we have previously published these same estimates [2], along with a description of the survey weighting procedures—which were modified since the first estimates were published (as outlined in a published erratum to the cited publication [3]). Briefly, since 2019, we have been able to incorporate the smoking trends from national ‘gold standard’ surveys in Canada and the US into the post-stratification sampling weights. A full description is provided in the study’s Technical Report [4], which is publicly available (see http://davidhammond.ca/projects/e-cigarettes/itc-youth-tobacco-ecig/).
Mr. Wang has also noted a change in the threshold used for a measure of frequent vaping/smoking: ≥20 days in past 30 days rather than ≥15 days, as previously reported [1]. We have adopted the convention of reporting using ≥20 days in past 30 days to align with the threshold commonly used by the US Centers for Disease Control for reporting data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), as well as the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study and the Mo...
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None declared. - Published on: 22 July 2022Some discrepancies and limitations
NOT PEER REVIEWED
There’s a published paper by Hammond and colleagues in 2019[1] using the same survey results, but there are some discrepancies.
1. The Table 2 of the 2019 paper, prevalence of vaping in 2018 for ever, past 30 days are 37.0% (1425), 14.6% (562) in Canada, 32.7% (1276), 8.9% (346) in England and 33.6% (1360), 16.2% (655) in the US, respectively. However, in this article’s Table 1, for vaping in the same year 2018 for ever, past 30 days are 33.2% (1275), 12.1% (463) in Canada, 33.1% (1283), 9.0% (351) in England and 33.1%(1336), 15.7% (635) in the US. More discrepancies can be found on cigarette smoking section as well. These numbers warrant further explanation particularly why numbers in Canada and the US decreased while numbers in England increased? Considering previous correction of numbers to the 2019 paper has raised serious concern among some readers[1], such timely clarification in this article will be very necessary.
2. The 2019 paper use the criteria of ≥15 days in past 30 days but the current paper adopts different criteria of ≥20 days in past 30 days, for both vaping and cigarette smoking. Further explanation is needed for such change.
Additionally, a few considerations on possible limitations of the paper’s findings:
1. Since the invitations were sent to nearly twice more parents than youth themselves according to the technical report[2], responds to survey questions might be biased because study has shown many...
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None declared.