Testing The Effectiveness Of Two Interventions To Reduce Vaccine Hesitancy Among Adolescents (Kidivax)

National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Vaccine Refusal; Vaccine Hesitancy; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice

Treatments: Behavioral: Activité Vaccins et Vaccination - LAMAP; Behavioral: Kidivax Chatbot

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06155877

ANR-21-SSMS-0006

Details and patient eligibility

About

Vaccines currently prevent several million deaths every year and more lives could be saved if vaccination take up increased. The World Health Organization identifies vaccine hesitancy as one of the ten most important threats to global health and emphasizes the importance of devising interventions to reduce vaccine hesitancy. The two most promising interventions rely on consensus messaging, which has robust but small effects, and interactive discussion, which has larger effects, but is difficult to scale up. School-based interventions aimed at adolescents have the potential to make the best of both types of interventions. Interventions that take place in schools can be conducted over longer periods of time (up to several hours) and are rolled out by a figure that is typically trusted and respected (the teacher). Moreover, intervening during adolescence is particularly timely since important vaccines are delivered at that age (most notably the human papillomavirus vaccine), and because attitudes towards vaccination during adolescence might have a long-lasting impact, as is the case for other health related attitudes.

This study tests the effectiveness of two interventions, a pedagogical intervention based on consensus messaging, and a chatbot intervention designed to mimic interactive discussion, on 9th grade French pupils.

Enrollment: 8,590 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• French 9th grade students (equivalent to "troisième")'
• One class per school

Exclusion criteria

• Do not understand French

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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8,590 participants in 3 patient groups

LAMAP intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Teachers receive two sets of activities, accompanied by a tutorial. Both sets of activities also include evaluation tools that teachers can use to clarify the objectives of the lesson and to assess the pupils' learning progress. The estimated length of each set is 5 hours.The activities and the tutorials were created by pedagogical experts of the Fondation La Main à la pâte, an NGO whose goal is to foster science education. Activities and tutorials are now freely available on the La Main a la pâte website. Teachers were free to choose whether to present the first or the second set of activities, and to choose how many of the activities to conduct. The actual length of the intervention thus varied from one classroom to another, which mimics ecological conditions. Teachers were asked to devote at least one hour to the activities. LAMAP activities are available on the experiment's OSF repository

Treatment:

Behavioral: Activité Vaccins et Vaccination - LAMAP

Chatbot intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Teachers, and then pupils, receive a link to a chatbot. This chatbot is a basic conversational agent that can answer the most common questions about vaccination. The chatbot is entirely scripted, providing users with a limited choice of questions at each stage. These questions are the most commonly raised questions about vaccination in adolescents, based on existing literature, and on focus groups conducted by our team. In this intervention, teachers will be asked to supervise the use of the chatbot in class. Pupils will use the chatbot either individually or in groups depending on the number of computers available. Teachers will be encouraged to conclude the intervention by a class discussion. Teachers will be asked to devote about one hour to this intervention (use of the chatbot and class discussion). The full chatbot text is available on the experiment's OSF repository

Treatment:

Behavioral: Kidivax Chatbot

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

In the control group, teachers were not sent any extra materials, and pupils were exposed to the standard curriculum. Teachers in the control group received the material after the end of the intervention. French teachers most commonly offer the course on vaccination during the last year of middle school (the equivalent of 9th grade). Time spent on this course varies and can be quite small.