NSF-SSRC: Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy Through Interactive Decision Aids

Hesitancy to take safe vaccines is a long-standing problem that predates COVID-19 and the outbreaks of measles surging in recent years. Some of the most effective interventions for vaccine hesitancy involve counseling sessions with trusted physicians who can address individual concerns. Unfortunately, such approaches are time consuming, costly, and depend on citizens having ready access to trusted primary care physicians. This project develops an online, individually-tailored video-based decision aid that will help people make decisions about vaccines that are informed by a better understanding of their risks and benefits, how they work, and how they are developed. The project is using ideas and methods from cognitive science to create and continually improve the interactive video modules. The resulting decision aid is available in both English and Spanish versions and has the promise of being an important new tool for public health vaccine education. Methods for visualizing and communicating risk have received considerable attention in studies of risk perception but have not been systematically tested at scale in the context of a real-world health-related decision problems. The primary aim of this project is to iteratively test and develop an individually-tailored video-based decision aid addressing vaccine hesitancy, using best practices from the risk perception, vaccine hesitancy, and process visualization literatures. A secondary aim is to test the efficacy of risk and data visualization methods for increasing the understanding of scientific concepts relevant to a complex real-world decision problem, and to test the link between that understanding and real-world decision outcomes. The project is using a data efficient, incremental method of empirically guided refinement by continuously testing alternative video/interactive contents and formats in randomized trials. Crucially, the data collection includes following up with participants to assess actual vaccine uptake as a function of the decision aid conditions. 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.