Electronic Cigarettes Analysis

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Many, if not all, people know the harms and dangers that come hand in hand with smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes harms nearly every organ in the body and causes many diseases and cancers. In fact, it is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). E-cigarettes have been created in hopes of reducing smoking habits. Some say that they can indeed help ween the public away from the toxins they receive from smoking regular cigarettes, but, not all agree. In an article from Newsweek, author Jessica Firger believes e-cigarettes may in fact lead young people to regular cigarette smoking. However, Firger’s article is weakened through her overgeneralization and her disregard for…show more content…
Primack and his colleges, that focuses on determining a relationship between e-cigarette use and regular cigarette use. They studied 694 young people aged 16-24. This participant group was split into two groups, those who smoke e-cigarettes but have no desire to smoke regular cigarettes and those who don’t smoke at all and have no desire to pick up the habit. Primack found that “11 of 16 e-cigarette smokers and 128 of the other 678 participants who had never used e-cigarettes progressed to smoking regular cigarettes.” Therefore, it was concluded that, when compared after one year, e-cigarette smokers do tend to move on to regular cigarette smoking more than non-e-cigarette users. Although, Primack’s finding was much overgeneralized because as stated in Firger’s article, of these 694 participants, only 16 were e-cigarette smokers. Regardless of Figer’s acknowledgement of the sample size, she still uses the study to strongly support her argument. Therefore, a group of 16 was taken to be representative of the entire population of e-cigarette smokers. According to Earl Babbie, this is a clear example of “overgeneralization on the basis of limited observations,” (Babbie, 6). Furthermore, the author may even be misperceiving the data as a pattern by comparing such a small group of e-cigarette smokers to the larger group of regular cigarette smokers. By only using a sample of 16 e-cigarette smokers in the study, a…show more content…
The researcher never identified if the 16 participants who were chosen to represent the population of e-cigarette smokers were actually randomly selected; they may have been friends or acquaintances. If this is the case, the 11 out of 16 who began to smoke regular cigarettes due to the e-cigarettes may have been a factor leading to those participants being exposed to the same environment or influences. If one of them started smoking regular cigarettes, it may have influenced more to start as well. Therefore, a much larger and more random sample was needed to avoid these circumstances and the lack of ecological

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