Public Q&A: Is there data to help a public health campaign reach 12-17 year-olds?

Here’s a data request I can’t fulfill, so I’m sharing it in the hopes that our community may provide some help:

We are going to do a general market campaign targeting at-risk youth and youth who have already experimented but don’t consider themselves [tobacco] users or smokers.  We are also doing campaigns targeting multicultural youth, LGBT, rural kids—in particular boys at risk for smokeless tobacco use, etc. We are looking at 12-17 year olds, with some campaigns focusing on 12-15 year olds—particularly low SES or kids with higher levels of stress, etc.

The problem we keep running into is that our data sources are for teens in general, and we think that the user profiles for our at-risk audiences may be very different.  In fact some of the youth we are targeting may reject the mainstream, so we want to take that into consideration in developing our digital strategies, channels and plans for these campaigns.

Do you have any data on youth usage of digital channels etc. by these demographics/psychographics—or do you know of such data?

I pointed to the Pew Internet: Teens summary as well as the Pew Internet: Health overview, noting that our data sets are available for independent analysis. And I think many of the insights that Lee Rainie shares in this slide deck apply to teens as well as adults: E-patients and their hunt for health information. But it’s true that the data applies mostly to mainstream use of online resources.

My colleague Amanda Lenhart pointed to the work that’s been done by Michele Ybarra of the Center for Innovative Public Health Research and Kim Mitchell of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, such as:

Out Online: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth (2013)

Other possible sources for data and insights include: National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Deb Levine of yth.org.

What else can we share with this public health advocate?