Social Media

Master of Public Health (MPH) student Jacqueline Clabeaux knows that leading communities to practice healthier lifestyles is a key role for public health professionals. That’s why she focused her This is Public Health (TIPH) Student Ambassador social media campaign on educating people on how to improve their health while strengthening their local communities through physical activities. 

A culturally-targeted social media campaign increases Hepatitis B (HBV) awareness among Korean Americans, one of the highest risk groups for an HBV infection, according to a new study from Dr. Alicia Hong, professor of Health Administration and Policy, along with Dr. Sojung Claire Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Communication, and Dr. Pramita Bagchi, assistant professor in the Department of Statistics.

Researchers from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative take on projects that expand the contributions of social scientists to cyber security challenges through funding of multidisciplinary projects.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Associate Professor Hong Xue and Professors Alison Cuellar and Lawrence Cheskin and colleagues at George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services examined associations between the amount of time spent on specific social media sites and the use of both e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes.  

While most of the social media platforms reviewed in the study showed no significant association with vaping, Xue and his colleagues did find that college-age e-cigarette users who spent more time on Snapchat did have a higher prevalence of lifetime e-cigarette use as well as an increased frequency of e-cigarette use in the past 30 days.

College-age e-cigarette users who are occasional or regular vapers spend an average of just over two hours a day on Snapchat, according to the study. Non-users, on the other hand, spend less than an hour each day on the app. The study also found that each extra hour on Snapchat was associated with a 4.61 percent increase in likelihood of lifetime e-cigarette use

When it comes sharing recipes on social media, what users post, and what they cook may be two different things according to a recent study led by Hong Xue, PhD at George Mason University. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), analyzed hundreds of recipes and found users liked and pinned posts that were healthy, but more heavily engaged off-line with recipes that were high in fat, sugar, and total calories.