The Vape-Free Campaign That Backfired
At the start of Term 2, a Year 12 health class ran a vape-free campaign: two assemblies, 40 posters, an Instagram page, and a rule that anyone caught vaping on school grounds would lose the right to attend the school ball. At the end of Term 1, an anonymous survey of 420 students found 22% had ever tried vaping and 11% could name a place to get help to quit. The same survey in Term 3 found 27% had ever tried vaping and 34% could name a quit-support service. The principal has told the class the campaign "didn't work" and suggested they "try something with more teeth." The class has the raw data and one term left.
1. Evaluate the principal's claim that the campaign "didn't work." What does the data support, and what does it not support?
Read the worked answer
The data does not support "it failed" as a single verdict. It supports two separate findings. On awareness of quit support, the campaign is associated with a rise from 11% to 34% - a large change, and the kind of outcome a campaign can plausibly produce. On ever tried vaping, the figure rose from 22% to 27%, but "ever tried" is a lifetime measure: it can only rise when new students try once, and it cannot fall, so it is a poor measure of a campaign's effect over one term. A rise of 5 percentage points over two terms could reflect Year 9s arriving, a new shop, or normalisation, not the campaign.
So the honest reading is: the campaign may have improved help-seeking knowledge while failing to reduce initiation - or it may have done neither, because there is no comparison group and no measure of how many students vaped in the last 30 days. Calling it a failure and escalating to "more teeth" is a judgement made on the wrong measure. The class should say that plainly, because it protects the part of the work that has evidence.
2. Recommend how the class should judge the campaign's success and what they should do next. Justify your reasoning.
Read the worked answer
Judge success on measures that match the campaign's aims, and add a 30-day measure. The aims were (a) raise awareness of quit support and (b) reduce uptake. For (a), the 11% to 34% change is meaningful, though it needs checking that students named the right service. For (b), replace "ever tried" with "vaped in the last 30 days" and repeat in the same tutor groups, so the comparison is like-for-like. A pre/post in four tutor groups is enough to see direction.
Next steps: keep the awareness work, because it is the part with evidence; drop the ball threat, which the data does not support and which may reduce honest disclosure; and add an environmental action - a visible, non-punitive quit pathway and a check on where students are getting vapes. Reasoning: punitive approaches tend to move behaviour underground, which makes the next measurement worse and hides the students who most need help. The class should present the split result honestly: "awareness up, initiation unclear" is a credible finding, and it is far more likely to keep the board and the principal onside than either defending or abandoning the whole campaign.