Testing the Persuasiveness of Pro-inoculation Arguments

University of Pennsylvania

Status: Completed

Conditions: Human Papillomavirus Vaccination; Vaccine Refusal; Vaccination Hesitancy

Treatments: Behavioral: Simple forewarning message; Behavioral: Argument inoculation messages

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05804825

dfjgehea

Details and patient eligibility

About

The investigators will recruit a national sample of parents of 7-10-year-olds to complete an argument strength ranking for either a simple forwarding message or between 3 and 6 randomly selected arguments from an overall set of 50 to 100 messages identified from various online sources. Parents will rate each message they see on measures of perceived argument strength/PME. Parents will also answer sociodemographic questions and then rank the believability of a set of anti-vaccine messages identified in a different study. Study findings will contribute valuable information to understanding the effectiveness of different inoculation messages.

Enrollment: 523 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

1. Male or female parent or legal guardian of an adolescent ages 7-10
2. Age eligible child has not yet received any doses of the HPV vaccine
3. Resides in the United States
4. English speaking
5. Completed informed consent

Exclusion criteria

1. Unable to read English at a 6th grade literacy level
2. Age < 18
3. Does not have a child within the age range of 7-10
4. Age-eligible child has received 1 or more doses of the HPV vaccine
5. Does not have a social media account on one or more of the following platforms OR does not read online news stories: Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook (feasibility testing only - survey participation will not have this exclusion criteria)
6. Unwilling or unable to provide informed consent to study participation

Trial design

Primary purpose: Other

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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523 participants in 2 patient groups

Simple forewarning message

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants will receive a simple short forewarning message to read and rate.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Simple forewarning message

Argument inoculation messages

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will view a random sample of 3 text-only short messages (from a corpus of 100 arguments) to read and rate.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Argument inoculation messages