E-cigarette specialty retailers: Data to assess the association between retail environment and student e-cigarette use

The retail environment is a major social determinant of health, yet little is known about the e-cigarette specialty retailer environment. The e-cigarette specialty retail environment may be associated with e-cigarette use by middle and high school students, an issue that was addressed in a recent article entitled, “E-cigarette use among students and e-cigarette specialty retailer presence near schools,” by Bostean and colleagues (G. Bostean, C.M. Crespi, P. Vorapharuek, W.J. McCarthy, 2016 [1]). We present data relating to e-cigarette specialty retailers in Orange County, California. We describe the data collection method (including the search methodology to identify e-cigarette specialty retailers), present descriptive retailer data including school proximity, and provide data from multi-level regressions predicting individual-level student use of e-cigarettes based on presence of an e-cigarette specialty retailer in proximity to schools.