SAFE ACTIVITIES SURVEY
Surveying and quizzing of the Covid Act Now user base about safe behaviors for the vaccinated.
Role: Lead Researcher
Company: Act Now Project (project: Covid Act Now)
Timeline: ~3 weeks
Research Method: Online Survey
Research Type: Exploratory, Descriptive
CONTEXT
Covid Act Now built local data models and products to help governments, private organizations, and tens of millions of people make informed, science-based decisions on how to stay safe during the COVID pandemic.
In May of 2021, as more people in the United States received their COVID-19 vaccines, the CDC updated much of its guidance for vaccinated people. Some of these updates included changes to masking recommendations (see right), travel recommendations, and in-person socializing recommendations.
We hypothesized that the communication of those recommendations, like the flyer on the right, might be confusing and unclear for many.
We also did not have a sense of whether our user base was largely already vaccinated, key information for determining our need to conduct persuasive, pro-vaccination campaigns.
GOALS
Generative Goals
See how well our users understood current guidance for vaccinated individuals
Assess how much of our user base has already been vaccinated.
Understand causes for hesitation to get vaccinated among our users, and whether there was a gap we could fill in promoting vaccination.
Product/Design Goals
Calibrate our newsletter content to better fit user needs and fill gaps left by CDC content.
Calibrate our social media content to better fit user needs and fill gaps left by CDC content.
Calibrate our website content (e.g., FAQs) to better fit user needs and fill gaps left by CDC content.
METHODS
Recruitment
The following survey was distributed to our newsletter subscriber list, resulting in 1995 responses.
2-Section Survey
Inquiry about vaccination status. For respondents who said they were not vaccinated, we asked them to share more about their reasons for hesitation.
2. Quiz questions about safe behaviors for vaccinated individuals. We designed survey questions that tested participants' knowledge on the current guidance for behaviors among vaccinated people.
These questions were presented as statements such as "It is safe to travel within the US if I am fully vaccinated", wherein respondents indicated whether it is true or false on a 5-point scale (see left), allowing us to assess both respondents' accuracy and confidence in that answer.
Analysis
I ran simple counting functions to calculate the rate of vaccination, and then I hand-coded the unvaccinated participants' open-ended responses and identified trends in their concerns based on themes (e.g., vaccine safety, vaccine access, vaccine efficacy, etc.).
To analyze the their knowledge of vaccine-related information, I coded their scaled true/false answers for each statement in the following way:
-2: confidently incorrect
-1: hesitantly incorrect
0: don't know
1: hesitantly correct
2: confidently correct
Then I assessed average scores per question and % of incorrect and "don't know" responses (i.e. -2s, -1s, and 0s, see some of this data in the chart below).
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Vaccine Hesitancy
96% of respondents were fully or partially vaccinated.
Of the unvaccinated respondents, the most frequent vaccine-related concerns posed were related to potential side effects and safety concerns.
Understanding of Behavioral Guidance
A majority of respondents correctly understood guidance around traveling, vaccinated people visiting with other vaccinated people while unmasked, and vaccinated people visiting with low-risk unvaccinated people from their own household without a mask. However, a large number of people still answered these questsions incorrectly or chose "don't know".
Respondents displayed the most confusion over guidance for vaccinated people visiting unvaccinated people from outside their household without masks (especially with regards to children, who were not yet eligible for the vaccine at this time), and over whether vaccinated people need to quarantine and get tested after a COVID-19 exposure.
implementation
We created new website content for our FAQs page to address the key confusion areas displayed by respondents. Since most respondents were already vaccinated, we decided to cater this content more toward simple guidance for vaccinated people and less on materials persuading people to get vaccinated.
Going further, we featured this content at the top of our newsletters, ensuring many would see it without having to actively seek it out.
We also designed a simple infographic series (below) to clarify some of the key guidance updates, which we shared via our social media outlets and on our email newsletter, totaling a viewership of over 200k followers.
