Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy among Hispanic Parents of COVID-19 Vaccine-Eligible Children

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Project Summary/Abstract COVID-19 vaccines, currently available to children over six months old, are a powerful method of preventing new infections and reducing the risk of hospitalization and death due to COVID-19. However, vaccination rates among Hispanic children remain suboptimal. Lower vaccination rates in children are largely due to parental vaccine hesitancy. While national health communication experts have suggested using storytelling as an effective intervention strategy to promote COVID-19 vaccination, we will take the innovative next steps of creating and evaluating a digital storytelling intervention to reduce Hispanic parental vaccine hesitancy. Working with community health workers, we will engage Hispanic parents and legal guardians who report being previously hesitant to vaccinate their child(ren) against COVID-19 to serve as our digital storytellers. We will ask them to share their stories of conversion in COVID-19 vaccine perspectives to help other parents and legal guardians overcome their unique concerns and mistrust of COVID-19 vaccines. Guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior and storytelling as culture-centric health promotion, we propose to (Aim 1) develop culturally-relevant digital stories (each 2-3 minutes long) with a diverse sample of Hispanic parents and legal guardians who transformed from being COVID-19 vaccine-hesitant to vaccine-accepting. In Aim 2, we will assess the feasibility and acceptability of a web-based pilot digital storytelling intervention vs. information-only control among parents and legal guardians (n=80) of children who are not up-to-update with COVID-19 vaccine doses. We will also explore pre- to post-intervention changes in vaccine perceptions, vaccine hesitancy, intentions to vaccinate children against COVID-19, and children’s vaccine uptake at two- month post-intervention. If our study demonstrates feasibility, acceptability, promising reductions in vaccine hesitancy, and increases in vaccine uptake, we will conduct a full-scale randomized controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of the DST intervention to reduce COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in our target population. This more extensive study could be used in future DST interventions to increase immunizations (e.g., flu, HPV) among Hispanic children and adolescents. In addition, our innovative research may provide evidence of scalable, disseminatable strategies to reduce vaccine hesitancy and can be used for other rapid vaccination efforts for potential future outbreaks.