Unwed Mothers‘ Private Safety Nets and Children‘s Socioemotional Wellbeing

Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,162) and the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (N = 1,308), we estimate associations between material and instrumental support available to unwed, low-income mothers and young children‘s socioemotional wellbeing. In multivariate OLS models, we find mothers‘ available support is negatively associated with children‘s behavior problems and positively associated with prosocial behavior in both datasets; associations between available support and children‘s internalizing and prosocial behaviors attenuate but remain robust in residualized change models. Overall, results support the hypothesis that the availability of a private safety net is positively associated with children‘s socioemotional adjustment.

What were the information voids? A qualitative analysis of questions asked by Dear Pandemic readers between august 2020-august 2021

In the current infodemic, how individuals receive information (channel), who it is coming from (source), and how it is framed can have an important effect on COVID-19 related mitigation behaviors. In light of these challenges presented by the infodemic, Dear Pandemic (DP) was created to directly address persistent questions related to COVID-19 and other health topics in the online environment. This is a qualitative analysis of 3806 questions that were submitted by DP readers to a question box on the Dear Pandemic website between August 30, 2020 and August 29, 2021. Analyses resulted in four themes: the need for clarification of other sources; lack of trust in information; recognition of possible misinformation; and questions on personal decision-making. Each theme reflects an unmet informational need of Dear Pandemic readers, which may be reflective of the broader informational gaps in our science communication efforts.This study highlights the role of an ad hoc risk communication platform in the current environment and uses questions submitted to the Dear Pandemic question box to identify informational needs of DP readers over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings may help clarify how organizations addressing health misinformation in the digital space can contribute to timely, responsive science communication and improve future communication efforts

What Were the Information Voids? A Qualitative Analysis of Questions Asked by Dear Pandemic Readers between August 2020-August 2021

In the current infodemic, how individuals receive information (channel), who it is coming from (source), and how it is framed can have an important effect on COVID-19 related mitigation behaviors. In light of these challenges presented by the infodemic, Dear Pandemic (DP) was created to directly address persistent questions related to COVID-19 and other health topics in the online environment. This is a qualitative analysis of 3806 questions that were submitted by DP readers to a question box on the Dear Pandemic website between August 30, 2020 and August 29, 2021. Analyses resulted in four themes: the need for clarification of other sources; lack of trust in information; recognition of possible misinformation; and questions on personal decision-making. Each theme reflects an unmet informational need of Dear Pandemic readers, which may be reflective of the broader informational gaps in our science communication efforts. This study highlights the role of an ad hoc risk communication platform in the current environment and uses questions submitted to the Dear Pandemic question box to identify informational needs of DP readers over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings may help clarify how organizations addressing health misinformation in the digital space can contribute to timely, responsive science communication and improve future communication efforts

The Target Efficiency of Online Medicaid/CHIP Enrollment: An Evaluation of Wisconsin’s ACCESS Internet Portal

States are building automated online processes to facilitate enrollment in Medicaid and the new health insurance exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Wisconsin’s build-out of ACCESS, its online application system for health coverage and other public benefits, happened concurrentl

Addressing anti-vaccine sentiment on public social media forums through online conversations based in Motivational Interviewing techniques

Research has shown that health misinformation in online social media spaces has real, negative health consequences. Despite a proliferation of research evaluating individual intervention tactics, usually in controlled experimental environments, there remains a dearth of field research testing interventions to address health misinformation in real-time, online, in situ on social media platforms. Here we describe the results of a pilot program of infodemiologists trained to intervene on anti-vaccine sentiment in Facebook comments sections of news article postings using various evidence-informed intervention techniques. Benchmarking our interventions to matched comments, we found that empathy-first communication strategies garner less engagement (defined as comments + emoji reactions) relative to matched controls. This work reinforces research on accuracy nudges and cyberbullying interventions that also reduce engagement. In addition to more research leveraging real-time interventions in real-world social media settings, more data transparency by technology platforms will be essential to finding effective counterspeech remedies to the problem of medical misinformation in digital environments

Fight Like a Nerdy Girl: The Dear Pandemic Playbook for Combating Health Misinformation

Raging alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, a parallel “infodemic” – an overwhelming swirl of information, both good and bad – has seriously compromised pandemic response. Medical falsehood is not a new problem; in the words of medical sociologist Nikolas Christakis, “everywhere you see the spread of germs, for the last few thousand years, you see right behind it the spread of lies.” But its ability to scale thanks to modern digital platforms represents a new and greatly intensified threat. Indeed, the impact of harmful information during the pandemic has been so profound that premier scientific leaders including the Director-General of the World Health Organization and the U.S. Surgeon General have issued urgent calls for the health sector workforce to proactively fight back. Like many other scientists, our all-woman team of “Nerdy Girls” took seriously this call. In March 2020 we launched a public education campaign on social media to do our part to fight the infodemic. Over 18 months and more than two thousand Facebook posts later, we have refined a set of core communication principles and named them with the mnemonic LET’S LEARN. We anticipate that these principles will feel intuitively familiar to health promotion professionals. Formalizing them into a framework provides shared language with which we can support each other as we navigate the new professional frontier of infodemic management

Dear Pandemic: A topic modeling analysis of COVID-19 information needs among readers of an online science communication campaign.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an infodemic -an overwhelming excess of accurate, inaccurate, and uncertain information. The social media-based science communication campaign Dear Pandemic was established to address the COVID-19 infodemic, in part by soliciting submissions from readers to an online question box. Our study characterized the information needs of Dear Pandemic\u27s readers by identifying themes and longitudinal trends among question box submissions. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective analysis of questions submitted from August 24, 2020, to August 24, 2021. We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling to identify 25 topics among the submissions, then used thematic analysis to interpret the topics based on their top words and submissions. We used t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding to visualize the relationship between topics, and we used generalized additive models to describe trends in topic prevalence over time. RESULTS: We analyzed 3839 submissions, 90% from United States-based readers. We classified the 25 topics into 6 overarching themes: \u27Scientific and Medical Basis of COVID-19,\u27 \u27COVID-19 Vaccine,\u27 \u27COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies,\u27 \u27Society and Institutions,\u27 \u27Family and Personal Relationships,\u27 and \u27Navigating the COVID-19 Infodemic.\u27 Trends in topics about viral variants, vaccination, COVID-19 mitigation strategies, and children aligned with the news cycle and reflected the anticipation of future events. Over time, vaccine-related submissions became increasingly related to those surrounding social interaction. CONCLUSIONS: Question box submissions represented distinct themes that varied in prominence over time. Dear Pandemic\u27s readers sought information that would not only clarify novel scientific concepts, but would also be timely and practical to their personal lives. Our question box format and topic modeling approach offers science communicators a robust methodology for tracking, understanding, and responding to the information needs of online audiences