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Our Process

Acknowledging the complexity of youth vaping, Protect Your Breath has been developed with The Hā Collective – a group of young people, experts and schools. This has helped us to:
Uncover

Uncover the relationship young people and their communities have with vaping – including common attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.
Explore

Explore creative opportunities to interrupt these ideas and behavioural norms.
Encourage

Encourage young people to think critically about their use of vaping products.
The Process
Our process has included three key elements.



Interviews with Experts
To ensure the campaign is grounded in existing research and evidence, we spoke with a long list of experts from academia, health promotion agencies, and service providers. These folks offered a wealth of knowledge in the areas of research, policy, and harm reduction strategy around tobacco and vaping use in Aotearoa.

Schools Survey
During the interview phase, our experts noted the lack of research on young people’s attitudes towards vaping.
To help us understand more about the role vaping plays in the lives of Aotearoa rangatahi, we collaborated with research agency Cogo to conduct an online survey for secondary school students. Eight schools participated, and we received 1975 complete responses from young people.

YOUTH-LED INSIGHT GATHERING AND CO-DESIGN
The academics, health promoters, and service providers we interviewed stressed that rangatahi themselves are the real experts on why young people are vaping. Recognising the wisdom of this view, we recruited a group of rangatahi from across Aotearoa - who formed the Hā Collective. These rangatahi are our project navigators, truth tellers, and key creative minds. Using worksheets, creative prompts, and conversation starters, the Hā Collective interviewed more than 100 of their friends and whānau about vaping. Using the insights gleaned during this process, they then worked collaboratively with the wider project team to investigate how best to communicate with other young people about vaping – helping set the direction for the entire campaign.