Public support for further regulating smoking, snus and e-cigarettes in Norway, and its associations with risk perceptions and tobacco use

Abstract

Background: Public support is an indication of the legitimacy of governmental tobacco interventions. Little is known about what it is that shapes the support for various tobacco policy measures. We examine whether there are differences in public support for new measures against smoking, snus, and e-cigarettes in Norway, and whether public support is associated with user status and perceptions of the products' harm potential.

Data and methods: In December 2017, 4,002 people aged between 16 and 89 answered a web-based questionnaire. The sample was randomly drawn from Norstat's web panel, and pre-stratified by gender, age, region, and education in order to obtain an approximate country-representative sample. Respondents were asked to indicate their support for eight possible future measures to further restrict accessibility of tobacco (asked separately with regard to smoking tobacco, snus and e-cigarettes respectively), on a five-point scale from 1 = 'no support' to 5 = 'full support'. We utilized means and t-tests to address differences in support between measures. We then constructed sum scores to assess the total support for regulating each tobacco product and subjected these indexes to linear regression analyses, controlling for background variables.

Results: For six of the eight proposed measures, public opinion is less supportive of e-cigarette regulations than of similar regulations for snus and, especially, smoking tobacco. In all three regression models, significant associations with risk perception, user status and gender were maintained after multiple controls. The associations with risk perceptions were stronger for support of snus and e-cigarette regulation than for smoking tobacco.

Conclusion: Overall, these findings illustrate the key role of risk perceptions in forming public opinions regarding tobacco-preventive regulations and underline the importance of information to ensure that population risk perceptions are accurate.

Keywords: Public support; Risk perceptions; Tobacco interventions; Tobacco products.