Arabic-Speaking Tobacco & Vaping Insights Research

Cancer Institute NSW (CINSW) sought to better understand the attitudes, behaviours and perceptions surrounding tobacco and vaping among Arabic-speaking communities in New South Wales. These insights were gathered to deliver culturally appropriate interventions and public health campaigns to reduce the uptake of these behaviours among Arabic speaking people, particularly young people.

To achieve this, CINSW engaged Bastion Insights and CulturalPulse to deliver targeted recruitment and culturally adapted facilitation of research groups with current smokers, current vapers, with a focus on building trust and ensuring language accessibility throughout the process.

The Approach

CulturalPulse delivered 15 in-language focus group discussions to explore attitudes, behaviours and values toward tobacco smoking and vaping.

• Conducted four groups with young people who had trialled or were susceptible to trailing smoking and vaping, six groups with current smokers and five groups with current vapers.
• Discussion groups were moderated in Arabic except for groups of people under 18 as they were found to be more confident in English than in formal standardised Arabic.
• Despite sharing a language, participants came from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds including those that were born in Australia and others that were born overseas. We included some who had recently arrived as well as those from a wide range of countries of origin including Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and more. Some participants told us they were Muslim and others were Christian.
• Discussions explored a wide range of smoking behaviours including those that smoked casually and others that smoked regularly. We explored the role of Shisha and other social and family influences, cultural stigma, knowledge of the harms of smoking and vaping and barriers to accessing credible health information.
• Key message territories were tested to understand impact and effectiveness and media and communication channels and language was explored.

The Outcome

The project successfully delivered high-quality, in-culture insights to inform future public health messaging, while strengthening relationships with Arabic-speaking communities in NSW.

• 15 research groups conducted in both Arabic and English.
• 80 Arabic-speaking participants recruited from across NSW.
  
• Delivered in-language moderation and participant comfort throughout.
• Provided in-language research group transcriptions and NAATI certified translations for all 15 groups.
• Delivered deep understanding of smoking and vaping behaviours to support targeted, culturally relevant campaigns.