Convergent evidence from survey/field experiments showing null effects of social norms & myths/facts messages on childhood vaccinations in VT.
This is one of the projects I'm most proud of in my career. Took >4 years to complete and would have been impossible without (a) our incredible partners at the Vermont Dept. of Health, Christine Finley and Meredith Graves, and (b) support from @theNASciences and Rita Allen Fdn.
The project was motivated by a simple question - can different or better messaging improve vaccine uptake? We have an increasing number of studies examining effects of message exposure on vaccine *intentions* but few or none examining effects on actual *behavior*.
Working with our partners, we carefully designed a study protecting private health information that allowed us to examine behavioral effects of an opt-in survey experiment and randomized messages sent to parents without us ever receiving identifying information.
Our null results suggest that relatively subtle variations in vaccine messaging have little effect at least at the dosage that e.g. public health agencies can usually deliver. Hopefully future research can test higher dosages and build on this design approach using larger samples
Per @katie_clayton14, important to note that our study offers an valuable framework for testing vaccine outreach / messaging. More studies need to link interventions with behavior, not just intentions. Two excellent recent examples: pnas.org/content/118/20…nature.com/articles/s4158…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
No one should be comforted by the Milley news. Trump's instability and effort to overturn the election unfortunately inspired a new kind of norm violation. However well-intentioned it may have been, we don't want generals deciding to take over foreign policy from civilians.
Partisan gap wildly overstated. Majority of Rs are getting vaccinated too. The problem is the intensity is concentrated in the anti-vax and anti-anti-anti-vax elements of the base.
“there isn’t really any middle ground on overthrowing the government. And that is what Mr. Trump and his allies were up to in 2020, through both violent and nonviolent means — and continue to be up to today.” nytimes.com/2021/09/10/opi…
An ongoing, increasingly party-wide attack on the legitimacy of our electoral system
Consistent w/@boralexander1@M_B_Petersen finding that online hostility reflects differences in who participates in political discussion online (cambridge.org/core/journals/…), we show commenters are unusually politically engaged & polarized.
Prior research has no baseline for assessing online comments so we compared FB comments w/comments we elicited from a public sample on those articles. Real-world comments and those from commenters were more toxic (using Perspective API).
Thread. I RTd what appeared to be a credible story about it but had second thoughts yesterday in need for more verification and found out it had already fallen apart
Per @jbview, "Lawmakers on the D fringe are ideological outliers but not radicals; those on the R fringe are radical, but not necessarily policy outliers." bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… GOP base energized by undermining election, anti-COVID restrictions, and race backlash, not policy.
This is always true, of course - policy is boring! But elites have provided some anyway in part due to demands from activists. With few demands of that type, GOP now almost content-free. Trump dispensed with a platform in 2020 & not clear what policy ideas the party would offer.
Note: Parties always seem confused and disjointed when out of power. But typically ambitious politicians start developing policies and trying to build consensus for platform in next election. Hard to do that when base rewards closed circuit of Fox hits and social media posturing.