Doctors' and nurses' social media ads reduced holiday travel and COVID-19 infections: a cluster randomized controlled trial
Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research (Massachusetts)|2021. (w29021):unpaginated. 15 ref.
; 2021.
Article
in English
| CAB Abstracts | ID: covidwho-1760220
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 epidemic, many health professionals started using mass communication on social media to relay critical information and persuade individuals to adopt preventative health behaviors. Our group of clinicians and nurses developed and recorded short video messages to encourage viewers to stay home for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. The researchers then conducted a two-stage clustered randomized controlled trial in 820 counties (covering 13 States) in the United States of a large-scale Facebook ad campaign disseminating these messages. In the first level of randomization, the researchers randomly divided the counties into two groups high intensity and low intensity. In the second level, the researchers randomly assigned zip codes to either treatment or control such that 75% of zip codes in high intensity counties received the treatment, while 25% of zip codes in low intensity counties received the treatment. In each treated zip code, the researchers sent the ad to as many Facebook subscribers as possible (11,954,109 users received at least one ad at Thanksgiving and 23,302,290 users received at least one ad at Christmas). The first primary outcome was aggregate holiday travel, measured using mobile phone location data, available at the county level the researchers find that average distance travelled in high-intensity counties changed by -0.993 percentage points (95% CI -1.616, -0.371, p-value 0.002) the three days before each holiday. The second primary outcome was COVID-19 infection at the zip-code level COVID-19 infections recorded in the two-week period starting five days post-holiday declined by 3.5 percent (adjusted 95% CI [-6.2 percent, -0.7 percent], p-value 0.013) in intervention zip codes compared to control zip codes.
Health Services [UU350]; Communication and Mass Media [UU360]; Information and Documentation [CC300]; Social Psychology and Social Anthropology [UU485]; Health Economics [EE118]; human diseases; randomized controlled trials; public health; communication; consumers; health care workers; holidays; human behaviour; information; internet; intervention; social media; mass media; man; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; USA
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Databases of international organizations
Database:
CAB Abstracts
Type of study:
Experimental Studies
/
Randomized controlled trials
Language:
English
Journal:
Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research (Massachusetts)|2021. (w29021):unpaginated. 15 ref.
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
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