Developing and Evaluating Messaging Strategies to Increase Peer Education About COVID-19 Vaccination and Climate Change Among Adults in the United States

Investigators will use a RCT peer education intervention to address climate change-related behaviors as a control condition for the vaccination intervention. Both issues represent serious public health priorities and are sufficiently unrelated in order to act as control conditions for each other.

As a control topic, investigators will address climate change communication. This parallel topic was selected because it is (1) reasonably unrelated to the COVID-19 condition, (2) has clear individual-level behaviors that can be targeted for intervention, (3) has diversity in public attitudes like COVID-19 vaccines,18 (4) has parallels in COVID-19 in terms of polarization and discrediting of scientific research, (5) represents a significant threat to population health, and (6) has significant racial and ethnic disparities paralleling those of COVID-19.

Investigators will recruit a second sample of up to 800 eligible participants who will be asked to complete an intervention session, where they will receive training on how to talk to members of their social network about either COVID-19 vaccination or climate change. The two intervention conditions will differ based on topic (vaccination/climate change) but the intervention components will be comparable. During the intervention, participants will watch a series of videos that teach key communication skills for having conversation about the assigned topic. Additional videos will provide training in how to use social media as a communication platform to share information in case participants are unfamiliar. Participants will then complete practice activities where they will construct hypothetical conversations and react to/critique example conversations to practice implementing the communication skills. Upon completing the intervention, participants will be asked to try to talk to others in their social network about the topic area they were assigned to.

Two to four weeks after the intervention, participants who completed the intervention will be asked to complete a follow-up survey to assess whether participants had conversations with others in their social networks, if they used social media/text/e-mail to share accurate information, and to understand the outcome of the conversations (i.e. did they result in behavior change).