JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A barrier to successful COVID-19 vaccine campaigns is the ongoing misinformation pandemic, or infodemic, which is contributing to vaccine hesitancy. Online population health interventions have been shown to impact health behaviors positively. For online interventions to be successful, they must employ effective learning design strategies that seek to address known issues with learner engagement and retention. To know if an intervention successfully addresses vaccine hesitancy, there must be some embedded measure to compare the learner pre-intervention and post-intervention.

Objective:

This protocol aims to study the effectiveness of an online population health intervention designed to address vaccine misinformation and hesitancy. The study will examine learner analytics to understand what aspects of the learning design for the intervention were effective and implement a validated instrument, the Adult Vaccine Hesitancy Scale, to measure if any changes in vaccine hesitancy were observed pre and post-intervention.

Methods:

We developed a fully online population health intervention to help learners identify misinformation concerning COVID-19 and share the science behind vaccinations. The intervention development utilizes a design-based research approach to output more effective interventions in which data can be analyzed to improve future health interventions. The study uses a quasi-experimental design in which a pre-post survey is given and compared statistically. Learning analytics will also be generated based on engagement and retention data collected through the intervention to understand what aspects of our learning design were effective.

Results:

The online intervention was released to the public in September 2021, and data collection is ongoing. To date, no external marketing or advertising has been done to market the course, making our current population of 343 participants (as of Jan 31) our pilot study population. Analysis of this initial population will enable revision to the intervention, which will then be marketed to a broader audience. Study outcomes are expected to be published by August 2022. We anticipate the release of the revised intervention by May 2022.

Conclusions:

Disseminating accurate information to the public during pandemic situations is vital to helping to contribute to positive health outcomes such as those which come from people getting vaccinated. Online interventions are valuable as they can reach people anytime, anywhere. However, online interventions must employ sound learning design to help incentive engagement and motivate learners to learn, and provide a means of evaluating the intervention to determine impact. This study will examine both the learning design and the effectiveness of the intervention using analytics collected within the intervention and a statistical analysis of a validated instrument to determine if learners had a change in vaccine hesitancy as a result of what they learned.