- Academic paper
Testing interventions to address vaccine hesitancy on Facebook in East and West Africa.
Leah R. Rosenzweig & Molly Offer-Westort
- August 14, 2014
- 3:46 pm
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BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
During mass vaccination campaigns, social media platforms can facilitate broader access to public health information, but they may also engender vaccine hesitancy through the spread of false or misleading information. We design and deploy a Facebook Messenger chatbot to test interventions targeting sources of vaccine hesitancy among social media users in Kenya and Nigeria. The main goal of the study is to evaluate the extent to which a concerns-addressing chatbot conversation is effective at increasing vaccination acceptance and self-reported vaccine intentions.
THEMATIC AREAS
We compare the interactive concerns-addressing chatbot to a chatbot that delivers a non-interactive PSA treatment, as well as a pure control. Using Facebook advertisements, we recruit social media users 18 years and older in Kenya and Nigeria, and deliver our interventions with a Messenger chatbot, facilitating interactions in a realistic setting. Using an adaptive experimental design, we are able to target the most effective interventions and learn what works best quickly during an ongoing global health crisis. This document describes our approach to study design and analysis.