NSF Award
2318512
This research identifies the messaging tactics that local, state, and federal health agencies employ to encourage vaccine uptake, and rigorously evaluate the degree to which those efforts are successful, in order to develop and implement a series of “best practices” for vaccine promotion communication. The project offers three key advancements over previous research that will improve vaccine communication in the United States. First, the researchers build a first-of-its-kind public database of federal and state public health agency vaccine communications on social media. Second, based on insights gleaned from the database, the researchers evaluate the efficacy of hundreds of vaccine promotion messages deployed by public health agencies on Americans’ vaccine attitudes and behaviors. Third, and arguably most importantly, this project deploys the messages deemed most promising in the experimental work at scale (a step rarely taken in most academic research) by conducting a large, online vaccine communication campaign and assessing its impact on vaccine uptake. This project advances peer reviewed interdisciplinary work on vaccine promotion, and helps health agencies better encourage vaccine uptake through the development of “best practices” for effective vaccine communication. <br/><br/>This project leverages insights from the science of science communication to build a multi-stage, multi-method, and multidisciplinary research agenda aimed at rigorously identifying (1) how health agencies have made an effort to encourage vaccine uptake for three vaccines (COVID-19, seasonal influenza, and tetanus) in the past, and (2) the degree to which those efforts are successful. The research accomplishes the first objective by employing “big data” content analytic procedures developed by the research team to identify themes and message design elements present in past efforts to encourage vaccine uptake from federal and local health agencies. The project then assesses the effectiveness of past vaccine promotion efforts via a series of randomized controlled trials embedded in public opinion surveys; including (a) a “pilot phase” conjoint experimental study embedded in a longitudinal survey capable of assessing the effectiveness of several hundred different messaging strategies, (b) a “confirmatory phase” factorial experiment – embedded in a nationally representative cross-sectional study – testing the effectiveness of the most promising interventions identified in the pilot phase, and (c) an “implementation phase” field experiment – conducted in partnership with market research agencies – that administers our most effective treatments identified in our “confirmatory phase” on search engine platforms. In the study’s field experimental phase, the researchers evaluate the effect of vaccine promotion messages on both verified vaccine uptake data and individual vaccine uptake self-reports from state-level opinion surveys deployed across a randomly selected set of treatment zip codes, within treated counties, and among a representative sample of five U.S. states.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
