Effectiveness of A Culturally-Tailored Vaccine Hesitancy Health Communcation Campaign Among Asian Americans in the Chicagoland Area

Background: Disparities in vaccination are associated with lack of access and low vaccine acceptance. While COVID-19 vaccination has been relatively high among the broader Asian American population, certain Asian immigrant groups have low vaccination rates related to lack of knowledge, limited access, language barriers, religious and cultural beliefs, and vaccine hesitancy. In order to increase vaccination uptake, it’s important to address those barriers through targeted health communication campaigns informed through community listening sessions. This gives space for common misconceptions and questions to be answered, potentially increasing one’s interest in getting vaccinated.

Program background:

The V-PROTECT Program aims to increase COVID-19 and influenza vaccination among Asian communities by addressing vaccine hesitancy, reducing real and perceived barriers to vaccination, and providing culturally and linguistically appropriate information and services that increase vaccine confidence.

Through this program, ethnic serving community-based organizations provide culturally and linguistically tailored health communication campaigns through social media posts, flyers, education, and videos, that addresses the vaccine misconceptions specific to their communities.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

In September 2022, three listening sessions (N=28) among Asian American participants were held to understand their attitudes, beliefs, and misconceptions around the COVID-19 and influenza vaccine. Informed by those listening sessions, culturally tailored vaccine health communication campaigns were created to address each community’s questions and concerns surrounding both the COVID-19 and influenza vaccine. These campaigns are multicomponent, consisting of social media posts, flyers, education, and vaccine videos.

One successful piece of the multicomponent campaign was the education sessions. Pre- and post-knowledge surveys measure the effectiveness of the education sessions by assessing if there was any knowledge growth after the education was given.

As of April 2023, 262 matched pre- and post-knowledge tests have been collected. For analysis, each participant was scored on the number of correct answers. 76.0% (N=199) of tests scores showed an improved knowledge score from the pre- to the post-survey. Individually, all questions showed above a 48.2% knowledge increase from the pre-test. A paired t-test was used to verify the total pre- and post-survey differences with results t=18.18 and p-value=0.00. This indicates a statistically significant change in scores after the education was administered. In addition to the education sessions, similar messaging was shared via social media, flyers, and videos.

Conclusions: After the vaccine health education was administered, there was significant improved knowledge scores indicating that participants learned from the session. A common influenza misconception was assessed through the question “Why should you get a flu shot every year”. After the education, the correct answer “flu variants” was selected with a knowledge growth increase of 120.8%. This indicates that the tailored health education was an effective proponent of the campaign to reduce the belief in vaccine-related misconceptions.

Implications for research and/or practice: Targeted vaccine health communication campaigns are effective ways to mitigate vaccine misinformation among Asian Americans in Chicago. Heath communication campaigns are not “one-size-fits-all" and should be tailored to the community participating. Listening to the community first is a great method to ensure campaigns are appropriate and successful.