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The State Vaccine Policy Project (Co-Director)
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers across the US to have introduced legislation aimed at weakening existing vaccine-related policies (e.g., vaccine mandates in employment or educational settings). However, reports of anti-vaccine policymaking (AVP) across state legislatures have been largely anecdotal. The State Vaccine Policy Project (SVPP) is a first-of-its-kind effort to quantify and standardize reporting of the prevalence, characteristics, and correlates of AVP. When completed, SVPP data will contain a content-coded record of every piece of vaccine-related legislation introduced across US statehouses from 1985 – 2023. Preliminary SVPP data collected from 2019-2023 reveal that both the total volume and proportion of anti-vaccine bills introduced across state legislatures has been increasing steadily since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 1 in 10 anti-vaccine bills being signed into law during that period. We also show that the rise in anti-vaccine legislating is attributable primarily to the legislative actions of state lawmakers affiliated with the Republican party, and that dozens of anti-vaccine bills directly aim to reduce the scope of vaccine mandates. In addition to offering a standardized and exhaustive assessment of the growth of anti-vaccine policymaking across US state legislatures, our work provides scholars with unique data for studying changes in the vaccine policy environment. Read more here.
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​​​​​​​Assessing the Effectiveness of Common Health Messaging Tactics on Vaccine Uptake (Principal Investigator)
Our NSF-funded research 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 will evaluate the effect of vaccine promotion messages on both verified vaccine uptake data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as 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. Read more here.
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Creator-Engaged Research to Promote Evidence-Based Health Attitudes & Behaviors
Our work, led by the Center for Health Communication at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, aims to work with social media content creators to study how to best communicate scientific evidence on vertical video based social media platforms. We use a wide range of methodological tools – including automated text analysis, large language modeling, population based survey experiments, and large scale field experiments embedded on social media – to study creator-led health promotion on social media. You can read more about the Center's research here, and review some of our previously-published work here. Ongoing population-based survey experimental work and observational large language modeling studies are available on OSF.
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