The Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) has been awarded a new contract with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) to investigate youth vaping and tobacco use in Philadelphia. This project, led by UHC faculty members Félice Lê-Scherban, PhD, MPH and Amy Carroll-Scott, PhD, MPH, expands on a brief 2-month Philadelphia Youth Vaping Survey (YVS) development contract received in spring 2026. This new 12-month project will launch the YVS Survey that the UHC team collaborated with PDPH to develop and will also support a new population-based citywide Community Health survey.
Though vaping & tobacco use among young people nationally has decreased from its peak in 2019, the opposite is true in Philadelphia. In the Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted every year among School District of Philadelphia high school students, 20% of students reported vaping in the past 30 days, up from 7% in 2019. This new project will seek to monitor e-cigarette use among Philadelphia youth over time, as well as changes in their attitudes and behaviors about e-cigarette and tobacco use.
The project will be based around a collaborative model where the UHC will support the development of the survey and build PDPH's internal capacity for conducting complex population-based surveys in the future. It will entail developing a sampling frame, sampling methodology, survey protocol, and quality control plan, supported by well-documented procedures and reproducible R code. In keeping with the UHC’s mission of training the urban health leaders of the future, the project will build capacity among PDPH staff through collaborative development, targeted training, and support for professional training in reproducible coding practices.