The e-cigarette assessment for youth-Revised (EAsY-R): Preliminary results of a pilot study of measure refinement via cognitive interviewing.

The prevalence of youth vaping has, in a relatively short time, become an "epidemic." In the wake of such labeling by the Surgeon General, a number of important examinations of vaping have been conducted. These have largely focused on high school and college-age youth as this demographic shows the greatest prevalence of use. Nonetheless, no measure has been made available which might allow for the comprehensive assessment of quantity and frequency of vaping among this age group, thus aiding in standardization across settings. The current study utilized cognitive interviews with high school and college-age youth who use vaping devices to inform the preliminary development of such an assessment. The sample consists of eight students between the ages of 15 and 24 (Mage = 18.75, SD = 2.73, 62.5% female, 75.0% Hispanic/Latino/a/x, 100.0% White). Interviewing and measure refinement were conducted in a two-phase iterative fashion. Suggestions made during cognitive interviews resulted in the refinement of assessed content type, updated categories and pictures of vaping devices, as well as updated and age-relevant terminology. Further, instructions were streamlined, and assessment items and multiple-choice options were refined to maximize clarity and to minimize participant confusion. The result of this study, the E-Cigarette Assessment for Youth Revised, is a unique tool for standardizing examinations of the quantity and frequency of vaping behaviors among high school students and college-age youth.

Smoothness as a quality of care: An STS approach to transnational healthcare mediation.

Medical travel and transnational healthcare involve various difficulties such as the distance and disconnect between patients and healthcare providers, language barriers or logistical challenges of moving ill bodies across space. Medical travel facilitation steps in with some sort of brokerage service that contributes to overcoming or managing these difficulties and, as this paper suggests, acts to create a quality of 'smoothness'. By unpacking three salient facilitation practices, namely connecting, communicating, and coordinating, this paper conceptualises the empirically derived category of 'smoothness'. This as a disposition, outcome, and spatio-temporal manoeuvre of medical travel facilitation. Based on the way in which such practices of mediation act to create smoothness, namely in an attentive, persistent, and collective tinkering manner, this paper suggests that some practices of medical travel facilitation are productively thought not just about setting up the possibility of care transnationally, but that they are key forms of care in itself. Based on these findings, smoothness is considered to be a central but also contested quality of medical travel facilitation and brokerage in a broader sense, but as proposed here, also for care. This conclusion potentially has implications not just for the study of transnational healthcare and mediation activities, but also that of care and transnational mobilities more generally.