"To manage the rapid rise of misleading information on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) during the pandemic, the Breakthrough ACTION project developed a theory-based rumortracking system to inform Guyana’s COVID-19 communication campaign. The rumor-tracking project used the extended parallel pro
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cessing model (EPPM) to identify and categorize rumors reflecting perceived high versus low vulnerability to COVID-19 and high versus low efficacy of engaging in recommended COVID-19 prevention behaviors. The project designed contextually relevant social and behavior change messages, called “MythBusters,” responded to rumor categories with the following objectives: (1) high perceived vulnerability and high efficacy rumors included a call to action; high perceived vulnerability and low efficacy rumors educated about effective and achievable solutions; (3) low perceived vulnerability and high efficacy rumors educated about risk; and (4) low perceived vulnerability and low efficacy rumors educated about risk and effective and achievable solutions. Results: Most rumors emanated from regions 4 and 8 (29%). Over two-thirds of the rumors (71%) recurred. Rumors were typically related to COVID-19 treatment or prevention (40%) and transmission (35%). Most rumors (48%) reflected low perceived vulnerability and low efficacy, 29% reflected high perceived vulnerability and low efficacy, 13% reflected low perceived vulnerability and high efficacy, and 10% reflected high perceived vulnerability and high efficacy. The project rapidly developed 12 MythBusters from June through December 2020 and integrated them into the national COVID-19 communication campaign, disseminated via radio, television, and Facebook. Estimates indicate that they have reached most of the target Guyanese population." (Abstract)
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"The current systematic review identified seven overall findings with distinct programmatic and research implications for capacity strengthening (CS) in social and behavior change communication (SBCC). First, there is a scarcity of literature about specific evaluation of CS for SBCC. Although CS has
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become a ‘buzz word’ in international development (Hawe et al., 2000), published evaluations of CS activities that aim to build SBCC capacity in LMICs are rare. Only 19 publications met the study’s eligibility criteria, and only three focused solely on CS findings. This review’s findings complement previous literature which has noted that evaluation of CS efforts for SBCC is rare (Lettenmaier et al., 2014). Future evaluations should publish their findings more widely in order to share lessons learned with others interested in implementing CS activities in SBCC and generate further knowledge about what works and what does not work. Second, the review found that among publications that described evaluation findings of CS for SBCC, most did not emphasize the assessment of CS activities. The details of how CS activities were evaluated was often lost in description of large multi-arm interventions that were not focused on SBCC or CS [...] Third, the current systematic review found that evaluation assessments of CS for SBCC generally employ non-experimental designs. Of the reviewed publications, only one described an experimental design [...] Fourth, in terms of the SBCC Capacity Ecosystem, while evaluations commonly addressed organization-level capacity and individual-level competencies, they rarely addressed system-level capacity [...] Fifth, publications highlighted several challenges regarding assessing sustainability of CS activities. Although CS is key to ensuring sustainable gains in development, most publications did not explicitly assess sustainability [...] Sixth, authors identified the shortcomings in terms of quality, both in terms of the writing as well as providing sufficient detail and documentation to support claims. Problems of clarity in the writing, particularly in gray literature, made it difficult to understand what kind of CS activities were most effective at strengthening capacity for SBCC [...] Finally, publications did not consistently support all of their recommendations and conclusions with evaluation findings." (Discussion, page 13-14)
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"Our search identified 31 systematic reviews, of which 17 were published. The proportion of health-related misinformation on social media ranged from 0.2% to 28.8%. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are critical in disseminating the rapid and far-reaching information. The most negative conseq
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uences of health misinformation are the increase of misleading or incorrect interpretations of available evidence, impact on mental health, misallocation of health resources and an increase in vaccination hesitancy. The increase of unreliable health information delays care provision and increases the occurrence of hateful and divisive rhetoric. Social media could also be a useful tool to combat misinformation during crises. Included reviews highlight the poor quality of published studies during health crises. Conclusion: Available evidence suggests that infodemics during health emergencies have an adverse effect on society. Multisectoral actions to counteract infodemics and health misinformation are needed, including developing legal policies, creating and promoting awareness campaigns, improving health-related content in mass media and increasing people’s digital and health literacy." (Abstract)
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"This paper describes an infodemic management system workflow based on digital data collection, qualitative methodology, and human-centered systems to support the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Ghana with examples of system implementation. Methods: The infodemic management system was developed by the H
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ealth Promotion Division of the GHS and the UNICEF Country Office. It uses Talkwalker, a social listening software platform, to collect misinformation on the web. The methodology relies on qualitative data analysis and interpretation as well as knowledge cocreation to verify the findings. A multi-sectoral National Misinformation Task Force was established to implement and oversee the misinformation management system. Two members of the task force were responsible for carrying out the analysis. They used Talkwalker to find posts that include the keywords related to COVID-19 vaccine–related discussions. They then assessed the significance of the posts on the basis of the engagement rate and potential reach of the posts, negative sentiments, and contextual factors. The process continues by identifying misinformation within the posts, rating the risk of identified misinformation posts, and developing proposed responses to address them. The results of the analysis are shared weekly with the Misinformation Task Force for their review and verification to ensure that the risk assessment and responses are feasible, practical, and acceptable in the context of Ghana." (Abstract)
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"Kilkari is the largest direct-to-beneficiary mobile communication programme in the world and has reached over 10 million women and their families across 13 states in India. Our study is the first randomised controlled trial conducted to date of a beneficiary mobile communication programme at scale.
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Exposure to Kilkari was significantly associated with improvements in a few important health practices, including the use of reversible contraceptive methods, but not others, including exclusive breast feeding. Subgroup analyses highlight the differential impact among key population segments, including the poorest." (Page 2)
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"To understand how communication action is conceived and practiced, we conducted a scoping review with a focus on two diseases currently targeted for elimination: lymphatic filariasis (LF) and Chagas disease (CD). We examined 43 studies published between 2012 and 2020 to identify communication pract
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ices, theoretical frameworks informing communication action and levels of intended influence. Community participation was the goal most commonly pursued through communication action, both in LF and CD strategies; important attempts at expanding the scope and reach of this practice were identified. However, our results indicate that while the field of health communication has gained complexity in the understanding of the nature of communication ecologies in public health interventions, neglected tropical diseases (NTD) research has maintained a superficial involvement with health communication theory and science. This article is a call to action to consider the resources offered by the health communication field when researching, designing, or implementing NTD interventions to enhance the possibilities of communication action in implementation settings." (Author summary)
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"In the light of recent emergencies in Europe and around the globe—including COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine—the spotlight has shifted towards the scarcity of Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) research applied to health emergencies. RCCE nurtures the sense of empowerment among c
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ommunities since it ensures that individuals and communities are part of the solution creation, thus they take informed decisions to protect their health and in turn, contribute to emergency control. Therefore, RCCE can play an important role as core public health intervention across health emergency preparedness and response. However, its tremendous impact, is still underestimated and not widely common. This viewpoint showcases the RCCE measures applied to the Ukrainian emergency to ensure that Ukrainian refugees access health services in host countries, based on their needs and concerns." (Abstract)
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"This work has highlighted the biased approaches in the use of imagery by those who hold power in global health. It is crucial to engage with these issues and to identify how we can work to treat individuals featured in global health imagery equitably, regardless of their circumstances, geography, r
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ace, gender, or socioeconomic status. The current narrative depicted within the imagery of infectious diseases reports in global health represents power imbalances driven by race, geography, and gender. This translates to women and children of colour that are based in low and middle income countries (LMICs) being treated with less dignity, respect, and power than those from high income countries (HICs). The absence of evidence of consent for using intrusive and unnecessary images, particularly of children in LMICs and often out of context to the narrative of the reports, is of particular concern." (Conclusions, page 163)
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"Adolescents in Mexico experience high pregnancy and birth rates. A collaboration with Grupo Televisa led to the development of an entertainment-education telenovela intervention, Overcome the Fear (OTF), which aired in 2020 to a national audience and addressed adolescent sexual and reproductive hea
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lth (SRH) topics. This study details the development and evaluation of OTF’s impact on adolescent contraceptive practices and parent-adolescent SRH communication in Mexico" [...] Conclusions: This study suggests that viewership of a high-quality entertainment-education telenovela informed by extensive formative research is related to adolescent health outcomes and to parent-adolescent SRH communication on a country-wide scale in Mexico. Entertainment-education remains an underutilized public health strategy, despite its promise to engage viewers and motivate healthful behaviors." (Abstract)
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"Against the background of the COVID-19 crisis in Israel, the country’s ultra-orthodox population, the Haredim, were faced with seemingly insuperable dilemmas of compromising their religious standards for the sake of dealing with the virus. The government launched a public relations campaign to pe
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rsuade this public, but its success was qualified. This study examines Israeli governmental information policy towards the Haredi population during COVID-19." (Abstract)
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"National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articula
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ting and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions of national ‘solidarity lite’ while relentlessly authorizing the crisis-ready responsible citizen. In so doing, they reproduce neoliberal rationality by shifting the locus of responsibility from the state and social structures to the individual and re-inscribing gendered and classed notions of responsibility, care and citizenship. Mobilizing national neoliberal narratives enables governments to render the pandemic legible as a crisis while obscuring both the structural injustices that exacerbate the crisis and the structural changes required to address it." (Abstract)
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"Existing research on factors informing public perceptions of expert trustworthiness was largely conducted during stable periods and in longestablished Western liberal democracies. This article asks whether the same factors apply during a major health crisis and in relatively new democracies. Drawin
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g on 120 interviews and diaries conducted during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, we identify two additional factors not acknowledged in existing research, namely personal contact with experts and experts’ independence from political elites. We also examine how different factors interact and show how distrust of experts can lead to exposure to online misinformation." (Abstract)
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"Existing research on media and the COVID-19 pandemic is largely based on quantitative data, focused on digital media, limited to single-country studies, and often West-centred. As such, it has limited capacity to provide a holistic account of the causes and consequences of audience engagement with
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COVID-19 news, or to consider the impact of systemic political and media factors. To compensate for that, we examine a large set of qualitative interviews and media diaries collected in four eastern European countries during the first wave of the pandemic. We show that changes in news consumption—including the resurgence of television and decline of print consumption—were not driven solely by audience demand for up-to-date information, but also by practical constrains of home-bound life in lockdown, and the introduction of live briefings. Our findings underscore disruption and uncertainty as key elements of audience experiences and highlight the markedly privatized and depoliticized nature of public debate in the early phase of the pandemic. We argue that the pandemic was an unpredictable, open-ended, and exhausting media event with high potential for divisiveness and polarization, especially in contexts marked by low levels of media freedom, declining democratic standards, and elite-led politicization of the crisis." (Abstract)
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"Wie denken gewöhnliche Russ:innen wirklich über die Entscheidung von Präsident Putin, in die Ukraine einzumarschieren? Obwohl einiges dafürspricht, dass frühere Umfragen, die Zustimmungswerte um 60 % für den Krieg zeigen, als genuine Signale der russischen öffentlichen Meinung gewertet werde
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n können, untersucht dieser Beitrag eine Reihe von Gründen, warum diese Umfrageergebnisse mit großer Vorsicht behandelt oder gar ignoriert werden sollten. Gründe dafür sind u. a. die staatliche Zensur, die Selbstzensur der Bevölkerung und eine verzerrte Beantwortung der Fragen, das Vorhandensein von Protesten sogar in einem autoritären Umfeld in Russland, als auch die Tatsache, dass einige der früheren Umfragen nach einem hypothetischen Einmarsch fragten, über den viele Russ:innen wohl nicht ausreichend nachgedacht haben könnten. Allerdings führt der Beitrag an, dass die plausibelste Erklärung für den offensichtlichen anfänglichen Rückhalt für den Krieg in der Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung durch staatliche Kontrolle der Kommunikationskanäle und der weitverbreitete Einsatz von Zensur, Propaganda und Desinformation im eigenen Land als auch im Ausland liegt." (Seite 6)
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"The aim of this review is to identify and describe the available literature on effective social media–based behavior change interventions within low- and middle-income countries [...] Results: We identified 1832 studies, of which 108 (5.89%) passed title-abstract review and were evaluated by full
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-text review. In all, 30.6% (33/108) were included in the final analysis. Although 22 studies concluded that the social media intervention was effective, only 13 quantified the level of social media engagement, of which, few used theory (n=8) or a conceptual model (n=5) of behavior change. Conclusions: We identified gaps in the settings of interventions, types and sectors of interventions, length of follow-up, evaluation techniques, use of theoretical and conceptual models, and discussions of the privacy implications of social media use." (Abstract)
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"To prevent the spread of COVID-19 and carry out a successful vaccination program especially in low-income countries, people must have faith on scientists and health experts. The most significant challenge to vaccination programs' efficacy is now regarded to be a lack of information and trust in imm
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unization due to myths and misinformation spread in the community. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the myth and misconceptions that are propagated about the COVID-19 vaccine, the refusal rate of the vaccine and determine the factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine refusal. A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted from December 7 to January 25, 2022. Face-to-face interviews with a standardized questionnaire were used to collect data on the variables. Data were entered into the statistical tool Epi data version 3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 25 for analysis. Binary logistic regression, both bivariable and multivariable, was conducted. In the multivariable binary logistic regression model, the adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence interval was used to declare statistically significant factors based on a p value less than 0.05. Factors like eHealth literacy, source of information about the vaccine, frequency of internet use, respondent's perception about the vaccine and computer literacy were found to be determinant factors for COVID-19 vaccine acceptance." (Abstract)
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