A Web-Based Public Health Intervention for Addressing Vaccine Misinformation: Protocol for Analyzing Learner Engagement and Impacts on the Hesitancy to Vaccinate

Abstract

Background: A barrier to successful COVID-19 vaccine campaigns is the ongoing misinformation pandemic, or infodemic, which is contributing to vaccine hesitancy. Web-based population health interventions have been shown to impact health behaviors positively. For web-based interventions to be successful, they must use 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 for comparing learners preintervention and postintervention.

Objective: This protocol aims to describe a study on the effectiveness of a web-based population health intervention that is 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 preintervention and postintervention.

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

Results: The web-based intervention was released to the public in September 2021, and data collection is ongoing. No external marketing or advertising has been done to market the course, making our current population of 486 participants our pilot study population. An analysis of this initial population will enable the revision of 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 contributing to positive health outcomes, such as those among people getting vaccinated. Web-based interventions are valuable, as they can reach people anytime and anywhere. However, web-based interventions must use sound learning design to help incentivize engagement and motivate learners to learn and must provide a means of evaluating the intervention to determine its impact. Our study will examine both the learning design and the effectiveness of the intervention by using the 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.