NSF-SSRC: An Intention-Action Framework for Improving the Impact of Public Health Initiatives

Addressing pressing public health challenges, such as controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases and managing chronic conditions, is critical for societal well-being. However, uptake of crucial healthcare resources, such as vaccines and preventive health screenings, is often suboptimal. As such, finding ways to develop evidence-based interventions to promote positive health behaviors is of the utmost importance. For scientific research to truly guide public health efforts, it is essential to a) understand why interventions capitalizing on knowledge of human behavior work in some settings but fail to reproduce similar effects in others; and b) examine when deploying a given intervention will be most successful at changing actual behavior in the field. This interdisciplinary proposal combines insights from psychology and behavioral economics, to understand when and among whom behavioral interventions can effectively change individuals' health behaviors in natural settings as well as how to optimally combine different types of interventions. The proposed research will leverage large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs), lab experiments, archival data, and machine learning to examine a wide range of consequential health behaviors (COVID-19 and flu vaccinations, cancer screening uptake, chronic condition management). The resulting knowledge helps develop nuanced theories of health decision making and advance the scientific frontier of building demand for vaccines and preventive screenings. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into the sources of heterogeneity that may explain why promising scientific findings fail to replicate in certain settings. Ultimately, this research has the potential to enhance the impact and reach of public health initiatives by offering actionable insights for customizing interventions to specific sub-populations and temporal contexts. 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.